[citation needed] Kluger grew up living with his mother, Ida, and older brother, Alan, on the Upper West Side of New York after his parents were divorced when he was seven.
[citation needed] Kluger has been greatly assisted in his nonfiction work by the research skills of his wife, the former Phyllis Schlain, whom he married in South Orange, New Jersey, in March 1957.
[citation needed] She attended Douglass College and later graduated from Columbia University, where she majored in art history.
Her six-foot-square quilt "The Princeton-Yale Game Increases in Intensity" is on permanent display at Princeton University's Frist Student Center.
Kluger left journalism to serve as executive editor at Simon & Schuster and editor-in-chief at Atheneum.
[2] In 2011, Kluger published The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America.