Jong, Erica 1942-

PERSONAL:

Born March 26, 1942, in New York, NY; daughter of Seymour (an importer) and Eda (a painter and designer) 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; child: (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—New York, NY. Agent—Amy Berkower, Writer's House Literary Agency, 21 W. 26th Street, New York, NY 10010. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer and lecturer. City College of the City University of New York, New York, lecturer in English, 1964-65, instructor in English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, 1969-70; University of Maryland, Overseas Division, Heidelberg, West Germany (now Germany), lecturer in English, 1966-69; YM/YWCA Poetry Center, New York, NY, instructor in poetry, 1971-73. Bread Loaf Writers Conference, instructor, 1981; 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; Madeline 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, reprinted, with a new afterword, New American Library (New York, NY), 2003.

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, reprinted, W.W. Norton 2003.

Parachutes and Kisses, New American Library (New York, NY), 1984, reprinted, Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2006.

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

Any Woman's Blues, Harper (New York, NY), 1990, reprinted, Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2006.

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

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

Witches (miscellany), illustrated by Joseph A. Smith, Abrams (New York, NY), 1981, reprinted, Harry N. Abrams (New York, NY), 1997.

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

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, reprinted, Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2007.

Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2006.

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.

ADAPTATIONS:

Fear of Flying was adapted as a sound recording that includes selections from poetry, Spoken Arts, 1976; Serenissima was adapted as a sound recording, Brilliance Corp./Houghton Mifflin (New York, NY), 1987; Becoming Light: New and Selected Poems was adapted as the sound recording Becoming Light, Dove Audio (Beverly Hills, CA), 1992.

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 became a "seminal book," as playwright Eve Ensler explained to Washington Post writer Teresa Wiltz. "It completely got women to think about their sexuality and their bodies and freedom in a whole new way."

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 extensively 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 the Dictionary of Literary Biography, her work is "generally positive and optimistic about the human condition." John Ditsky, writing for the 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 Stollerman Wing—a poet and writer like her creator—is a woman obsessed with her own sexuality, and the novel recounts her 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 the 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 the 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." As Claire Dederer noted in Nation, "it wasn't sex, exactly, that made women's hair stand on end and conservatives' noses wrinkle" when they read Jong's novel. "It was the unmistakable whiff of real life. Fear of Flying is filled with soft penises, missed orgasms, crabby partners—all the messiness of real sex. Here was someone—a female someone—telling the truth about sex." What's more, the novel gained Jong a surprisingly diverse readership. According to Dederer, Jong "describes going on her first book tour and meeting ‘blackjack dealers in Reno who never read a novel until Fear of Flying.’ Itchy women who didn't know what they wanted found it in Fear of Flying, and what they found was, in the end, feminism. It was a feminism that wanted to look pretty. It was a feminism that gleefully had sex with men. It was a feminism that admitted to not being a tower of strength."

Critical reaction to Fear of Flying has varied. John Updike noted in the 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, writing in the 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. Isadora embarks on a lesbian affair, partakes in an orgy, 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 the 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 Gill 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 and eventually finding contentment of sorts with a young actor named Bean. "When she is not taking herself too seriously, Miss Jong's Miss Wing is a wonderfully humorous Central Park West character," wrote Herbert Mitgang in New York Times. "You can tell her apart from others on the bumpy Connecticut highway of love by her personal license plate—a four-letter word for female genitalia derived from Chaucer."

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, writing in the 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. "Codependency is just a trendy term for being a well-socialized woman," Jong explained to Josh Getlin in the 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. 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 also noted the author's continued defense and reiteration of the sexually liberated attitudes embodied over twenty years earlier in Fear of Flying. However, Fear of Fifty has been praised for its engaging style: what Roberta Rubenstein lauded in the Chicago Tribune as a "funny, wise, candid, poignant, brash, painful, soul-baring, occasionally moralistic, but never dull memoir." Jong, observed Joseph Olshan in People Weekly, has written a book that is "part confessional, part cocktail chatter and part intellectual cant." The book, Jong told Olshan, "tells the story of where we have been and where we are going, especially as women.… It seems to have a very emotional charge for people."

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. An affair with handsome singer Alcaeus belies the fact that he prefers boys to women, though he fathers Sappho's daughter, Cleis. 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 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.

Of Jong's characters, the eponymous protagonist of the novel Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones is one of her favorites. When asked by Boston Globe interviewer Meredith Goldstein whether she was the alter-ego of her character, Isadora Bird, Jong answered: "If someone wants to identify me with a heroine, I'd pick Fanny Hackabout, who is quite adventurous and admires bravery above all things. I always thought she was a better heroine."

Fanny has often been described as a rewriting of eighteenth-century novels. It is a pastiche of motifs, plot devices, and characters from Fanny Hill, Gulliver's Travels, and other works, especially Tom Jones, but from a feminist perspective. Like Tom Jones, Fanny is a foundling, and her adventures center around solving the mystery of her parentage. Like Tom, she experiences several travails, including capture by highway-men and sexual debasement; like Tom, her courage and fortitude see her through to a happy ending.

Having written spiritedly about middle age in Fear of Fifty, Jong produced another memoir, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, in her sixties. In this book, described by New York Times Book Review contributor Ron Power as a "headlong, disheveled memoir and ‘fledgling’ writer's instructional," Jong again rhapsodizes about her passions: writing and sex. "There's something nice about the freedom of getting older," Jong told Teresa Wiltz in the Washington Post. As Wiltz noted, Jong enthuses in the book that "sex in the sixties is delicious, karmic, a total melding of sense and spirit." Jong includes details about the many men with whom she has been sexually involved (and a smaller number who remained merely platonic friends), her daughter's struggle with drug addiction, and her treatment for alcoholism. She also discusses literature and writers. One of the better sections of the book, according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, is a thoughtful piece on women writers who have taken their own lives, including Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf. Still, the reviewer felt that Seducing the Demon is "just serious enough to count as literary," and not substantial enough to be a truly satisfying book. Valeda Dent, writing in Library Journal, also noted this relative superficiality, observing that Jong never examines the "foundation of privilege" that provided the financial support that enabled her to pursue a literary career. Power also expressed disappointment in the book, commenting that the energy and inventiveness of Fear of Flying is absent. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman, on the other hand, found Seducing the Demon as a "smart and saucy" book that is "funny, brazen, and sly." Seaman also enjoyed Jong's "stinging commentary" about a contemporary American society that does not value literature and art, that is moralistic and hypocritical, and that is uncomfortable with pleasure for its own sake.

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.

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; Volume 152: American Novelists since World War II, 1995.

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.

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

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

le;&.5qOstriker, 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, Scribner (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 & Meier (New York, NY), 1983.

PERIODICALS

American Spectator, March, 1981, Joshua Gilder, review of Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, pp. 36-37.

Artforum International, October 1, 1993, Mim Udovitch, review of The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller, p. 7.

Atlantic, December, 1973, Benjamin DeMott, "Couple Trouble: Mod and Trad," pp. 122-127; August 1, 1997, review of Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters, p. 98.

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

Biography, summer, 2006, Cynthia Holz, review of Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life.

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

Booklist, May 1, 1997, Donna Seaman, review of Inventing Memory, p. 1461; July 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of What Do Women Want? Bread, Roses, Sex, Power, p. 1826; November 15, 1999, Bonnie Smothers, Brad Hooper, and Kristine Huntley, review of Fear of Flying, p. 601; March 1, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of Sappho's Leap, p. 1107; February 15, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of Seducing the Demon, p. 36.

Bookseller, September 10, 2004, "Press Coverage Spurs Jong Reprint," p. 25.

Boston Globe, July 15, 2006, Meredith Goldstein, "Sex and the 60s."

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; July 31, 1994, Roberta Rubenstein, review of Fear of Fifty, section 14, p. 3.

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.

Economist, November 15, 1997, "Of Blessed Memory," p. 14.

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

Entertainment Weekly, August 1, 1997, Megan Harlan, review of Inventing Memory, p. 68.

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

Hollins Critic, February 1, 1980, Cathy Hankla, "At the Edge of the Body," p. 18.

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; February 15, 2006, review of Seducing the Demon, p. 171.

Library Journal, June 1, 1997, Beth E. Andersen, review of Inventing Memory, p. 148; September 15, 1998, Barbara O'Hara, review of What Do Women Want?, p. 100; July 1, 2000, Michael Rogers, review of Witches, p. 148; April 1, 2003, Barbara Hoffert, review of Sappho's Leap, p. 129; June 15, 2006, Valeda Dent, review of Seducing the Demon, p. 69.

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

Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1990, Josh Getlin, interview with Erica Jong, 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.

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

Midwest Quarterly, September 22, 2000, Robert F. Scott, "‘Sweets and Bitters’: Fanny and the Feminization of the Eighteenth-Century Novel," p. 81.

Nation, October 6, 2003, Claire Dederer, "She's Gotta Have It," p. 23.

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 Leader, February 8, 1993, Hope Hale Davis, review of The Devil at Large, p. 17.

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

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.

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

New York Review of Books, April 28, 1977, Diane Johnson, review of How to Save Your Own Life; November 6, 1980, Clive James, "Fannikin's Cunnikin," review of Fanny, p. 25.

New York Times, September 7, 1974, "Henry Miller and Erica Jong: Two Writers in Praise of Rabelais and Each Other," p. 27; March 11, 1977, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of How to Save Your Own Life, p. C25; August 4, 1980; October 10, 1984, Herbert Mitgang, review of Parachutes and Kisses.

New York Times Book Review, March 20, 1977, John Leonard, "Isadora Wing Flies Again"; April 19, 1987, Michael Malone, review of Serenissima: A Novel of Venice, p. 12; January 28, 1990, Benjamin DeMott, review of Any Woman's Blues, p. 13; May 18, 2003, Joy Connolly, "Cliff Notes"; April 23, 2006, Ron Powers, review of How to Save Your Own Life.

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, article by John Ditsky.

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

People Weekly, April 2, 1984, "Mommy and Daddy Are Fighting Again since Erica Jong Used Her Daughter's Name in a Children's Guide to Divorce," p. 51; July 9, 1984, review of Megan's Book of Divorce, p. 12; May 25, 1987, Campbell Geeslin, review of Serenissima, p. 20; September 12, 1994, Joseph Olshan, "Bawdy by Jong," p. 77.

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

Publishers Weekly, January 18, 1993, review of The Devil at Large, p. 461; July 22, 1996, review of Megan's Two Houses, p. 240; May 5, 1997, review of Inventing Memory, p. 193; July 27, 1998, review of What Do Women Want?, p. 60; 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; February 6, 2006, review of Seducing the Demon, p. 62.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1993, Brooke Horvath, review of The Devil at Large.

Revue Française d'Études 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, August, 1980, Anthony Burgess, review of Fanny, pp. 54-55.

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

Time, February 5, 1975, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "The Loves of Isadora," pp. 69-70; March 14, 1977; June 22, 1987; R.Z. Sheppard, review of Se-renissima, p. 74; April 4, 2005, "No Fear of Family: Erica's Daughter Molly Jong-Fast Depicts an Almost Famous Childhood," p. 14.

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 with author, 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 with author, p. 11.

Times Literary Supplement, 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, p. 44; March 19, 1999, Mary Margaret McCabe, review of What Do Women Want?, p. 4.

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

University of Dayton Review, winter, 1986-1987, Francis Baumli, "Erica Jong Revisited, or No Wonder We Men Had Trouble Understanding Feminism," pp. 17-20.

USA Today, September 1, 1993, Frank Kernowski, review of The Devil at Large, p. 96.

Vanity Fair, George Wayne, May 1, 2003, "The Jong and the Restless," p. 166.

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

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

Washington Post, March 26, 2006, Teresa Wiltz, "And an Older Erica Jong Learns to Love Zippers," p. D1.

Washington Post Book World, August 17, 1980, Judith Martin, review of Fanny, p. 4; April 19, 1987, Joan Aiken, review of Serenissima, pp. 4-5.

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

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

ONLINE

Erica Jong Home Page,http://www.ericajong.com (July 25, 2007).