Ella Leffland (born November 25, 1931) is an American novelist and short story writer. Highly regarded by other writers, her novels demonstrate stunning mastery of the techniques of realistic fiction; but Leffland uses her facility to illuminate characters whose imaginative lives are rich and often strange. The settings of most of her works are in northern California, where she grew up; she is perhaps best known for her semi-autobiographical novel Rumors of Peace (1979; reprinted as a "rediscovered classic" in 2011) about a girl coming of age during World War II. The fascination with personal and social evil that Leffland explores in Rumors of Peace emerges powerfully in her ambitious historical novel based on the life of Hermann Göring, Knight, Death and the Devil, published in 1990.