Jane Mendelsohn is an American author.

Born and raised in New York City, she is a graduate of Yale, where she was a Connecticut Student Poet.  After attending Yale Law School for a year and a half, she left to pursue writing.  She began publishing book reviews in the Village Voice in 1990.  Since then, her pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Yale Review, Literary Hub, and the London Review of Books.

Her first novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, was published by Knopf in 1996 to widespread critical acclaim. It became a New York Times bestseller, was translated into many languages, was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 1997, and long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award in 1998.  Her second novel, Innocence, was published in 2000 and was adapted into a feature film. American Music was published by Knopf in the summer of 2010, and is being adapted into a musical commissioned by the American Repertory Theater. Her most recent book, Burning Down the House, was published by Knopf in 2016.

She lives in New York City with her daughters and husband, filmmaker Nick Davis.