Cynthia (Shoshana) Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children. She moved to the Bronx with her Russian-born parents, Celia (Regelson) and William Ozick, proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood. As a girl, Cynthia helped to deliver prescriptions. Growing up in the Bronx, she remembers stones thrown at her and being called a Christ-killer as she ran past the two churches in her neighborhood. In school she was publicly shamed for refusing to sing Christmas carols.

She earned her B.A. from New York University and went on to study English Literature at Ohio State University, where she completed an M.A.

Ozick's fiction and essays are often about Jewish American life, but she also writes on a broad range of topics including politics, history, and literary criticism. Furthermore, she has written and translated poetry.

Her novel Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), called The Bear Boy in the United Kingdom, received much praise in the literary press. The Din in the Head is her sixth collection of literary essays.

In 1986, she was selected as the first winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Ozick was on the shortlist for the 2005 Man Booker International Prize, and in 2008 she was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award established by Bernard Malamud’s family "to honor excellence in the art of the short story".

Novels

• Trust (1966)
• The Cannibal Galaxy (1983)
• The Messiah of Stockholm (1987)
• The Puttermesser Papers (1997)
• Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) -- (published in the United Kingdom as The Bear Boy (2005)

Shorter Fiction

• The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971)
• Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976)
• Levitation: Five Fictions (1982)
• Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1989)
• The Shawl (1989)
• Collected Stories (2007)
• A Quartet (2008)

Essays

• All the World Wants the Jews Dead (1974)
• Art and Ardor (1983)
• Metaphor & Memory (1989)
• What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers (1993)
• Fame & Folly: Essays (1996)
• Quarrel & Quandary (2000)
• The Din in the Head: Essays (2006)

Drama

• Blue Light (1994)

Miscellaneous

• A Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996)
• The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (introduction 2001)

• 2000 NY Times: The Girl Who Would Be James by John Sutherland (on Ozick's book Quarrel & Quandary)

• 2002 Partisan Review: Cynthia Ozick, Aesthete by Sanford Pinsker

• 2004 Law and Literature, vol. 16, pp. 229-235 (summer, 2004): Reading and Misreading the Reader by Jeffrey I. Roth (on Ozick's essay The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination)

• 2005 The Guardian: The World is Not Enough by Ali Smith (on Ozick's book The Bear Boy)

• 2006 Moondance magazine: Answering the Writer's Tumult — On Cynthia Ozick's 'The Din in the Head' by Lys Anzia
• The Canon as Cannon, by Walter Kirn, New York Times Book Review