Jong, Erica

Jong, Erica (Erica Mann Jong) (jông, zhông), 1942–, American novelist and poet, b. New York City. She created a sensation with Fear of Flying (1973), a comic, picaresque novel of sex and psychiatry that challenged conventional views of women. Her other works include the poems in Half Lives (1973); the novels Fanny (1980), Any Woman's Blues (1990), and Sappho's Leap (2003); and the memoirs Fear of Fifty (1994) and Seducing the Demon (2006).

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Jong, Erica (b. Mann) (1942–  ) writer, poet; born in New York City. She studied at Barnard College (B.A. 1963), and Columbia University (M.A. 1965; School of Fine Arts 1969–70). She taught at a variety of institutions in New York City, and in Heidelberg, Germany, as a faculty member of the Overseas Division of the University of Maryland. She wrote volumes of poetry and novels, and achieved some celebrity with Fear of Flying: A Novel (1973), a story of sexual fantasies that some read as a liberating text for women.