Jong, Erica 1942–

PERSONAL: Born March 26, 1942, in New York, NY; daughter of Seymour (an importer) and Eda (a painter and designer; maiden name, Mirsky) Mann; married Michael Werthman (divorced, 1965), married Allan Jong (a child psychiatrist), 1966 (divorced, September 16, 1975); married Jonathan Fast (a writer), December, 1977 (divorced, January, 1983); married Kenneth David Burrows (a lawyer), August 5, 1989; children: (third marriage) Molly Miranda. Education: Attended High School of Music and Art, New York, NY; Barnard College, B.A., 1963; Columbia University, M.A., 1965; postgraduate study at Columbia School of Fine Arts, 1969–70. Politics: "Left-leaning feminist." Religion: "Devout pagan."

ADDRESSES: Office—425 Park Ave., New York, NY 10022-3506; fax: 212-421-5279. Agent—Ed Victor, 6 Bayley St., Bedford Sq., London WC1, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and lecturer. City College of the City University of New York, lecturer in English, 1964–65 and 1969–70; University of Maryland, Overseas Division, Heidelberg, West Germany (now Germany), lecturer in English, 1966–69; instructor in English, Manhattan Community College, 1969–70; YM/YWCA Poetry Center, New York City, instructor in poetry, 1971–73; Bread Loaf Writers Conference, instructor, 1981, and Salzburg Seminar, instructor, 1993. Judge in fiction, National Book Award, 1995. Member, New York State Council on the Arts, 1972–74.

MEMBER: PEN, Authors League of America, Authors Guild (president, 1991–93), Dramatists Guild of America, Writers Guild of America, Poetry Society of America, National Writers Union (member of advisory board), Poets and Writers, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: American Academy of Poets Award, George Weldwood Murray fellow, Barnard College, both 1963; Woodrow Wilson fellow, Columbia University, 1964; New York State Council on the Arts grant, 1971; Borestone Mountain Award in poetry, 1971; Bess Hokin prize, Poetry magazine, 1971; Made-line Sadin Award, New York Quarterly, 1972; Alice Faye di Castagnolia Award, Poetry Society of America, 1972; Creative Artists Public Service award, 1973, for Half-Lives; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1973–74; Welsh College of Music and Drama, honorary fellow, 1994; International Sigmund Freud prize, 1979.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Fear of Flying, Holt (New York, NY), 1973.

How to Save Your Own Life, Holt (New York, NY), 1977.

Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, New American Library (New York, NY), 1980.

Parachutes and Kisses, New American Library (New York, NY), 1984.

Serenissima: A Novel of Venice, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1987, published as Shylock's Daughter, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1995.

Any Woman's Blues, Harper (New York, NY), 1990.

Megan's Two Houses: A Story of Adjustment, Dove Kids (West Hollywood, CA), 1996.

Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997.

Sappho's Leap, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2003.

POETRY

Fruits and Vegetables, Holt (New York, NY), 1971.

Half-Lives, Holt (New York, NY), 1973.

Loveroot, Holt (New York, NY), 1975.

Here Comes, and Other Poems, New American Library (New York, NY), 1975.

The Poetry of Erica Jong (three volumes), Holt (New York, NY), 1976.

Selected Poetry, Granada (London, England), 1977.

The Poetry Suit, Konglomerati Press (Gulfport, FL), 1978.

At the Edge of the Body, Holt (New York, NY), 1979.

Ordinary Miracles: New Poems, New American Library (New York, NY), 1983.

Becoming Light: New and Selected Poems, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1991.

OTHER

Fear of Flying (sound recording; includes selections from poetry and from the novel of the same title), Spoken Arts, 1976.

(Contributor) Four Visions of America, Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1977.

Witches (miscellany), illustrated by Joseph A. Smith, Abrams (New York, NY), 1981.

Megan's Book of Divorce: A Kid's Book for Adults, illustrated by Freya Tanz, New American Library (New York, NY), 1984.

Serenissima (sound recording of the novel of the same title), Brilliance Corp./Houghton (New York, NY), 1987.

Becoming Light (sound recording of the book of the same title), Dove Audio (Beverly Hills, CA.), 1992.

The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller, Turtle Bay (New York, NY), 1993.

Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.

Zipless: Songs of Abandon from the Erotic Poetry of Erica Jong, 1995.

(Editor) In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry (sound recording), Rhino Records, 1998.

What Do Women Want?: Bread, Roses, Sex, Power, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1998.

Also author of introduction to edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, 1988; author, with Jonathan Fast, of screenplay Love al Dente. Contributor of poems and articles to numerous newspapers and periodicals, including Esquire, Ladies' Home Journal, Los Angeles Times, Ms., Nation, New Republic, New York, New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and Vogue.

SIDELIGHTS: Best known as the author of the 1973 best-selling novel Fear of Flying, Erica Jong has received critical attention for her frank and unabashed portrayal of female sexuality. Despite Jong's literary output in the areas of poetry and social criticism, Interview contributor Karen Burke noted that "her fame from the enormous success of Fear of Flying has overshadowed these accomplishments." Recounting one woman's escapades during her search for sexual realization, Fear of Flying won its author "a special place in woman's literary history" in the opinion of Ms. reviewer Karen Fitzgerald. "Jong was the first woman to write in such a daring and humorous way about sex," Fitzgerald explained. "She popularized the idea of a woman's ultimate sexual fantasy … sex for the sake of sex."

Jong's poetry is written in the confessional mode, the "crazed exposure of the American ego," according to Douglas Dunn in Encounter. Dunn noted the similarity of Jong's verse to the work of confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, who wrote exten-sively on existential despair and the relations between men and women—and who each ultimately committed suicide. Unlike such literary predecessors, Jong chooses to affirm life; according to Benjamin Franklin V in Dictionary of Literary Biography, her work is "generally positive and optimistic about the human condition." John Ditsky, writing for Ontario Review, explained that Jong is "a Sexton determined to survive"; he sees the influence of sensualist poet Walt Whitman in her verse. Above all, said Franklin, "her own work illustrates women's victory and that, instead of flaunting their success and subduing men, women and men should work together and bolster each other."

Fear of Flying protagonist Isadora Zelda White Stoller-man Wing—a poet and writer like her creator—is a woman "unblushingly preoccupied with her own libido," according to Elizabeth Peer of Newsweek. Fear of Flying recounts Isadora's adventures in search of the ideal sexual experience. While accompanying her Chinese-American Freudian analyst husband to a congress of psychoanalysts in Vienna, she meets Adrian Goodlove, an English analyst and self-proclaimed free spirit. Goodlove coaxes Wing to leave her husband and run off with him on an existential holiday across Europe where they can gratify their sexual appetites without guilt and remorse. In the course of this sensual odyssey, Isadora realizes that Adrian, who had epitomized sex-for-the-sake-of-sex, is in fact impotent, and no source of good love at all. As Carol Johnson wrote in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Isadora finds Adrian's "promised 'liberation' to be simply a new style of confinement." After two weeks he deserts Isadora to keep a planned rendezvous with his own family and she returns to her husband unrepentant, if unfulfilled.

While sex plays a major role in Fear of Flying, it is only one of the novel's main focuses. Johnson remarked that the story "revolves around themes of feminism and guilt, creativity and sex," and indeed, Jong told Interview's Burke that Fear of Flying is "not an endorsement of promiscuity at all. It [is] about a young woman growing up and finding her own independence and finding the right to think her own thoughts, to fantasize." Emily Toth pointed out in Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Fear of Flying is essentially a literary novel, a bildungsroman with strong parallels to the Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, and the myths of Daedalus and Icarus." Parts of the book may be regarded as satirical: Johnson stated that Jong's most erotic scenes "are parodies of contemporary pornography, her liberated woman [is] openly thwarted and unfulfilled." Other aspects of the novel, according to an Atlantic contributor, include a "diatribe against marriage—against the dread dullness of habitual, connubial sex, against the paucity of means of reconciling the desire for freedom and the need for closeness, against childbearing," and a search for personal creativity.

Critical reaction to Fear of Flying has varied. John Updike noted in New Yorker that Jong's work possesses "class and sass, brightness and bite." He compared the author to Chaucer and her protagonist to the Wife of Bath in the Canterbury Tales, and found parallels between Fear of Flying and both J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of New York Times praised Jong's characterization of Isadora, saying, "I can't remember ever before feeling quite so free to identify my own feelings with those of a female protagonist." He concluded that "Isadora Wing, with her unfettered yearnings for sexual satisfaction and her touching struggle for identity and self-confidence, is really more of a person than a woman (which isn't to deny in the least Mrs. Jong's underlying point that it's harder to become a person if you're a woman than it is if you're a man)." In a New York Times appraisal, novelist Henry Miller compared Fear of Flying to his own Tropic of Cancer—only "not as bitter and much funnier"—and predicted that "this book will make literary history, that because of it women are going to find their own voice and give us great sagas of sex, life, joy, and adventure."

Isadora's story is continued in How to Save Your Own Life. Now a successful author of the very daring and explicit novel Candida Confesses, she strikes out on her own after her husband confesses to an affair with another woman early in their marriage. "Despite herb tea and sympathy" from various female friends, said Isa Kapp in Washington Post Book World, "her frame of mind is gloomy." Her sexual experiments continue, Kapp added, and include "a Lesbian episode justified as research, and an orgy itemized like the instructions for stuffing a holiday turkey." Isadora leaves her husband and travels to California to visit a movie producer interested in filming her book. There she meets and falls in love with Josh Ace, an aspiring screenwriter some years younger than herself. Convinced that she has found her ideal man, she prepares to settle down. New York Review of Books contributor Diane Johnson praised How to Save Your Own Life as "a plain, wholesome American story, containing as it does that peculiarly American and purely literary substance Fulfillment, [the] modern equivalent of fairy gold." However, in New York Times Book Review, John Leonard found the novel lacking in the "energy and irreverence of Fear of Flying…. Whereas the author of Fear of Flying was looking inside her own head, shuffling her fantasies, and with a manic gusto playing out her hand, the author of How to Save Your Own Life is looking over her shoulder, afraid that the critics might be gaining on her."

Some seven years later Isadora's latest romance sours; now almost forty and the mother of a three-year-old girl, she is deserted by Josh. Jong's 1984 novel Parachutes and Kisses tells of Isadora's attempt to cope with the pressures and problems of being a single mother, of approaching middle age, and of supporting a household on a writer's income. "It is about having it all in the 1980s," Jong explained to Gil Pyrah of the London Times. "Isadora exemplified the 1970s woman and now, in the 1980s, we are trying to be single parents, breadwinners, and feminine at the same time." In the course of her journey toward self-realization, Jong's heroine tours Russia, characteristically encountering a number of sexual adventures on the way. She eventually finds contentment of sorts with a young actor named Bean in the novel, which Washington Post Book World reviewer Grace Lichtenstein noted "is funny and searching enough to suggest that How to Save Your Own Life was Jong's sophomoric jinx."

Any Woman's Blues, which Jong published in 1990, is linked to the author's previous three novels in that it is presented in an introduction by a fictitious literary scholar as a manuscript left behind by Isadora Wing after she boards an airplane headed for the South Pacific and mysteriously disappears. "I knew I wanted to write a fable of a woman living in the Reagan era of excess and greed and avarice," Jong explained to Lynn Van Matre of Chicago Tribune in describing the novel, "an artist at the height of her powers who is hopelessly addicted to a younger man and goes through all the different states of change to get free." Protagonist Leila Sand is a wealthy and successful artist who is obsessed by her unfaithful and manipulative young lover. Focusing on Sand's codependence upon male attention, Any Woman's Blues follows Sand's downward spiral into alcoholism, sexual depravity, and drug abuse, coming up for air as she gains a spiritual strength that enables her to take control of her life. By the end of the story, Sand emerges as has Isadora before her: a more self-assured, emotionally integrated, focused person. "Co-dependency is just a trendy term for being a well-socialized woman," Jong explained to Josh Getlin in Los Angeles Times. "We're all trained to put other people's needs before our own. We're trained to be validated by what our husbands, children, and lovers think of us. It's not uniquely feminine, but it's considered normal in women, whereas in men it's considered a disease."

In 1994 Jong published Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir, described by Lynn Freed in Washington Post Book World as "a funny, pungent, and highly entertaining memoir of her growing up, her men, her marriages, her motherhood, her writing, her successes and her failures on all fronts. And she has done so … with all her customary candor." The autobiography draws from the drama of the artist's own life, which has caused some critics to comment on the newsworthy Jong's obvious inability to either totally empathize with or reflect a global midlife female consciousness. Several critics have also noted the author's continued defense and reiteration of the sexually liberated attitudes embodied over twenty years earlier in Fear of Flying. "Two decades is a long time to go on playing the naughty girl who can sling dirty words and sleep around just like the guys," stated reviewer Nancy Mairs in New York Times Book Review. "What might have been outre at age thirty seems passe at age fifty." However, Fear of Fifty has been praised for its engaging style: what Roberta Rubenstein lauded in Chicago Tribune as a "funny, wise, candid, poignant, brash, painful, soul-baring, occasionally moralistic, but never dull memoir."

Jong's 2003 novel, Sappho's Leap, offers a "highly imaginative, sexy, and shrewd interpretation of the life of the first known woman poet, Sappho, who lived on the island of Lesbos 2,600 years ago and wrote and performed poems of indelible candor and eroticism," wrote Donna Seaman in Booklist. Sappho, the seventh-century B.C. Greek poet of sensual and sexual verse, is considered by some an early symbol of feminism. Beginning with her teenage years, the book traces Sappho through affairs with both sexes, arranged marriages, intellectual victories, and conversations with the gods. She has an affair with handsome singer Alcaeus who fathers her daughter, Cleis, even though he prefers boys to women. Then, a marriage to a foul and corpulent merchant creates dilemmas for Sappho, but she manages to avoid any consummation. In the end, the book proffers the premise that the seventh-century B.C. Greek poet Sappho did not commit suicide by leaping into the sea, propelled by unrequited love as legend would have it, but instead lived a rich and eventful life of travel, intellectual pursuits, and sexual escapades.

"The result is a vivid and entertaining portrait, but it's so juicily overwritten that one can't help but cringe," remarked Barbara Hoffert in Library Journal. Penelope Mesic, writing in Book also stated that the book was overwrought. "At least Sappho's frequent, explicit sexual encounters keep the reader turning the pages," wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Lorna Koski, writing in Women's Wear Daily, concluded that Sappho's Leap is "a rollicking, imaginative recreation of her life, times, and writing," with a number of authentic historical figures included in the mix.

In her work, Jong, "creates an energetic, garrulous, witty, and tender verse, both erudite and earthy, about the conflict between sexuality and inhibiting intelligence, about death (and one's impulse both toward and away from suicide), the problems of sexual and creative energy (both consuming and propelling), and the hunger for love, knowledge, and connecting," observed an essayist in Contemporary Novelists. "Although she has aligned herself with the feminist movement, her poetry goes beyond the dilemma of being a woman in a male-dominated world, or for that matter, a Jew in an urban culture, to the ubiquitous need for human completeness in a fiercely hostile social and cosmic world."

Within each of Jong's fictional works are "women who are in an ambiguous position, philosophically confused, emotionally overwrought," according to Burke, who maintained that the author uses these women to create "a realistic collage of the woman's situation today." Jong agreed, describing the void she attempted to fill in literature about women to Burke in Interview: "Nobody was writing honestly about women and the variousness of their experience." What was missing from the American literary scene, she concluded, was "a thinking woman who also had a sexual life," a woman who could be as heroic as any man. As Peer has observed, Jong's protagonists make it clear "that women and men are less different than literature has led us to believe. With a courage that ranges from deeply serious to devil-may-care, Jong … [has] stripped off the pretty masks that women traditionally wear, exposing them as vulgar, lecherous and greedy, frightened and flawed—in short, as bewilderingly human. Sort of like men." For the author, writing such works has been a process of personal self-exposure as well. "It's a very profound self-analysis. It's like meditation," Jong confided to Dana Micucci of Chicago Tribune. "I try to tell a certain truth about the interior of my life and other women's lives. If you're writing the kinds of books I write, you come out a changed person."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Burstein, Janet Handler, Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters: Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American Jewish Women, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1996.

Chapple, Steve, and David Talbot, Burning Desires: Sex in America. A Report from the Field, Signet (New York, NY), 1990.

Charney, Maurice, Sexual Fiction, Methuen (London, England), 1981.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 18, 1981, Volume 85, 1994.

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Cooper-Clark, Diana, Interviews with Contemporary Novelists, Macmillan (London, England), 1986.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, 1978, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, 1980, Volume 28: Twentieth-Century Jewish-American Fiction Writers, 1984.

Friedman, Edward H., The Antiheroine's Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1987.

Greene, Gayle, Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1991.

Modern American Literature, Volume 2, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Ostriker, Alicia Susan, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1986.

Packard, William, The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from the New York Quarterly, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1974.

Parini, Jay, editor in chief, American Writers, Supplement 5, Charles Scribner's Sons (New York, NY), 2000.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin, editor, The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1985.

Templin, Charlotte, Daughters of Valor: Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers, University of Delaware Press (Newark, DE), 1997.

Templin, Charlotte, Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong, University of Kansas Press (Lawrence, KS), 1995.

Templin, Charlotte, editor, Conversations with Erica Jong, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2002.

Todd, Janet, Women Writers Talking, Holmes and Meier (New York, NY), 1983.

Walden, Daniel, editor, Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

PERIODICALS

American Spectator, March, 1981, Joshua Gilder, review of Fanny, pp. 36-37.

Atlantic, December, 1973, Benjamin DeMott, "Couple Trouble: Mod and Trad," pp. 122-127; April, 1977; November, 1981.

Australian Women's Book Review, September, 1990, Julie Ann Ruth, "Isadora and Fanny, Jessica, and Erica: The Feminist Discourse of Erica Jong."

Book, May-June 2003, Penelope Mesic, review of Sappho's Leap, pp. 83-85.

Booklist, November 15, 1999, Bonnie Smothers, Brad Hooper, Kristine Huntley, review of Fear of Flying, p. 601; March 1, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of Sappho's Leap, p. 1107.

Boston Review, March-April 1992, Charlotte Temple, "The Mispronounced Poet: An Interview with Erica Jong," pp. 5-8, 23, 29.

Centennial Review, summer, 1987, Robert J. Butler, "The Woman Writer as American Picaro: Patterns of Movement in the Novels of Erica Jong," pp. 308-329.

Chicago Sun-Times, July 31, 1997, Susy Schultz, "Jong's Zipping Along," p. 33.

Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1990, Lynn Van Matre, "Every Woman's Blues: Erica Jong Shows Why Every Book 'Should Be a Healing Experience,'" p. 8; April 25, 1993, sec. 6, p. 3; July 31, 1994, sec. 14, p. 3; August 18, 1994, sec. 5, pp. 1-2.

Chicago Tribune Magazine, December 12, 1982.

Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 1984, Merle Rubin, "Diving into the Shallows of Narcissism," review of Parachutes and Kisses, pp. 21-22.

Columbia Forum, winter, 1975, Elaine Showalter and Carol Smith, "An Interview with Erica Jong," pp. 12-17.

Commentary, December, 1974, Jane Larkin Crain, "Feminist Fiction," review of Fear of Flying, pp. 58-62.

Detroit Free Press, May 17, 1987.

Economist, November 15, 1997, p. 14.

Elle, January, 1990, Margaret Cezair Thompson, review of Any Woman's Blues, p. 69.

Encounter, July, 1974; December, 1974.

Feminist Studies, spring, 1998, Molly Hite, "Writing and Reading—The Body: Female Sexuality and Recent Feminist Fiction," pp. 121-142.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), November 24, 1984; November 21, 1987.

Harper's Bazaar, August, 1984.

Hudson Review, autumn, 1990, William M. Pritchard, "Novel Reports," review of Any Woman's Blues, pp. 489-498.

International Journal of Women's Studies, May-June, 1978, Joan Reardon, "Fear of Flying: Developing the Feminist Novel," pp. 306-320.

Interview, July, 1987, Karen Burke, interview with Erica Jong, pp. 95-96.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2003, review of Sappho's Leap, p. 336.

Library Journal, September 1, 1994, p. 202; June 1, 1997, p. 148; July, 2000, Michael Rogers, review of Witches, p. 148; April 1, 2003, Barbara Hoffert, review of Sappho's Leap, p. 129.

Listener, August 23, 1990, Helen Burth, review of Any Woman's Blues, p. 28.

Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1981; May 16, 1987; May 18, 1987; January 22, 1990, pp. E1-2.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 20, 1977, Craig Fisher, "Fear of Flying Heroine Flies a New Flight Plan," review of How to Save Your Own Life, p. 112; August 17, 1980; June 24, 1984; November 11, 1984; August 21, 1994, pp. 2, 10.

Maclean's, August 21, 1978, Philip Fleishman, interview with Erica Jong, pp. 4-6.

Ms., November, 1980; July, 1981; July, 1986; June, 1987.

National Review, May 24, 1974, Patricia S. Coyne, "Women's Lit," review of Fear of Flying, p. 604; April 29, 1977, D. Keith Mano, "The Authoress as Aphid," review of How to Save Your Own Life, p. 498.

New Republic, February 2, 1974; September 20, 1980.

New Review, May, 1974.

New Statesman, April 19, 1974, Paul Theroux, "Hapless Organ," p. 554; January 1, 1999, Claire Rayner, review of What Do Women Want? Bread, Roses, Sex, Power, pp. 48-49.

Newsweek, November 12, 1973; May 5, 1975; March 28, 1977; November 5, 1984.

New York, June 9, 1975, Alfred Kazin, "The Writer as Sexual Show-off; or, Making Press Agents Unnecessary," pp. 36-40; July 18, 1994, Amy Virshup, "For Mature Audiences Only," pp. 40-47.

New Yorker, December 17, 1973, John Updike, "Jong Love," pp. 149-153; April 4, 1977; October 13, 1980; November 19, 1984.

New York Now, September 10, 1998, Wayne Robbins, "Flying High Again," pp. 17, 48.

New York Review of Books, March 21, 1974; April 28, 1977; November 6, 1980, Clive James, "Fannikin's Cunnikin," review of Fanny, p. 25.

New York Times, August 25, 1973; November 6, 1973; September 7, 1974, Henry Miller and Erica Jong, "Two Writers in Praise of Rabelais and Each Other," p. 27; June 11, 1975; March 11, 1977, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of How to Save Your Own Life, p. C25; August 4, 1980; August 28, 1980; March 8, 1984; October 10, 1984; September 20, 1996.

New York Times Book Review, August 12, 1973; November 11, 1973; September 7, 1975; March 20, 1977; March 5, 1978; September 2, 1979; August 17, 1980; April 12, 1981; October 31, 1982; July 1, 1984; October 21, 1984; April 19, 1987, Michael Malone, review of Serenissima, p. 12; June 5, 1988; January 28, 1990, Benjamin Demott, review of Any Woman's Blues, p. 13; February 14, 1993, p. 10; July 24, 1994, p. 6; July 20, 1997, p. 17.

Novel, winter, 1987, James Mandrell, "Questions of Genre and Gender: Contemporary American Versions of the Feminine Picaresque," pp. 149-170.

Observer (London, England), January 31, 1999, review of What Do Women Want?, p. 11.

Observer Review, April 21, 1974, Martin Amis, "Isadora's Complaint," review of Fear of Flying, p. 37.

Ontario Review, fall-winter, 1975–76.

Parnassus, spring-summer, 1974, Margaret Atwood, pp. 98, 104.

People, May 25, 1987; September 12, 1994, p. 77.

Playboy, September, 1975, Gretchen McNeese, interview with Erica Jong.

Poetry, March, 1974.

Publishers Weekly, February 14, 1977; January 4, 1985; February 22, 1985; June 13, 1994, p. 22; July 4, 1994, p. 48; July 22, 1996, p. 240; May 5, 1997, p. 193; June 3, 2002, John F. Baker, "Jong's Sappho Novel for Norton," review of Sappho's Leap, p. 16; April 28, 2003, review of Sappho's Leap, pp. 47-48.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1993, pp. 242-243.

Revue Française d'Etudes Americaines, November, 1986, Rolande Diot, "Sexus, Nexus, and Taboos versus Female Humor," p. 11.

Rice University Studies, winter, 1978, Jane Chance Nitzsche, "'Isadora Icarus': The Mythic Unity of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying," pp. 89-100.

Saturday Review, December 18, 1971; April 30, 1977; August, 1980, Anthony Burgess, review of Fanny, pp. 54-55; November, 1981; December, 1981.

Spare Rib, July, 1977, Rozsika Parker and Eleanor Stephens, interview with Erica Jong, pp. 15-17.

Spectator, September 3, 1994, p. 37.

Time, February 5, 1975, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "The Loves of Isadora," pp. 69-70; March 14, 1977; June 22, 1987.

Time Out, September 10, 1998, Gia Kourlas, "From Fear to Eternity: Twenty-five Years after Fear of Flying, Erica Jong Wonders What Do Women Want?" (interview), p. 208.

Times (London, England), November 27, 1980, Stuart Evans, review of Fanny, p. 14; November 2, 1984, Gill Pyrah, "Erica Tries a Parachute" (interview), p 11.

Times Literary Supplement, April 27, 1973; July 26, 1974; May 6, 1977; October 24, 1980; September 18, 1987, Valentine Cunningham, review of Serenissima, p. 1025; June 23, 1993, pp. 4-5; October 7, 1994, Wendy Steiner, review of Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir, p. 44; March 19, 1999, Mary Margaret McCabe, review of What do Women Want?, p. 4.

Toronto Star, November 2, 1997, Judy Stoffman, "Port-noy, Stop Your Complaining. Writer Erica Jong Fights Stereotypes of Jewish Women," p. C4.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), June 10, 1979; August 10, 1980; April 5, 1981; October 14, 1984; April 5, 1987; April 25, 1990, pp. 11-13; July 31, 1994, p. 3.

University of Dayton Review, winter, 1986–1986, Francis Baumli, "Erica Jong Revisited, or No Wonder We Men Had Trouble Understanding Feminism," pp. 17-20.

Village Voice Literary Supplement, November 22, 1973, Molly Haskell, review of Fear of Flying, p. 27.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1979.

Viva, September, 1977, interview with Erica Jong.

Wall Street Journal, November 21, 1984, Anita Susan Grossman, "Sorry, Jong Number Three," review of Parachutes and Kisses, p. 28.

Washington Post, July 27, 1994, pp. 1, 12.

Washington Post Book World, December 19, 1971; July 6, 1975; March 20, 1977; August 17, 1980, Judith Martin, review of Fanny, p. 4; October 21, 1984; April 19, 1987, Joan Aiken, review of Serenissima, pp. 4-5; June 6, 1993, pp. 4-5; July 31, 1994, p. 5.

Women's Review of Books, November, 1994, Isabelle de Courtivron, review of Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir, pp. 15-16.

Women's Wear Daily, May 14, 2003, Lorna Koski, review of Sappho's Leap, p. 20.

Writer's Digest, John Kern, "Erica: Being the True History of Isadora Wing, Fanny Hackabout-Jones, and Erica Jong" (interview), pp. 20-25.

ONLINE

Erica Jong Home Page, http://www.ericajong.com/ (November 13, 2003).