A short life of the author
Erica Mann Jong (26 March 1942 – 16 October 2025) was an American novelist and poet whose novel Fear of Flying (1973) was one of the most commercially successful and culturally significant novels of the 1970s — a book that sold over 37 million copies worldwide, was translated into over forty languages, and became, for a generation of readers, the definitive novelistic expression of the women’s liberation movement’s demand that women be allowed to inhabit their own desires. The novel’s protagonist, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing, is a writer, an intellectual, a wife, and a woman who wants to experience sexual freedom without guilt — a desire that the novel explores with a frankness, a wit, and a psychological complexity that made it both a bestseller and a serious literary achievement.
Life
Jong was born in New York City to a family of artists and intellectuals. She attended Barnard College and Columbia University, where she received an M.A. in eighteenth-century English literature. She published her first book of poems, Fruits & Vegetables (1971), before writing Fear of Flying. She was married four times, lived in New York City, and continued writing novels, poetry, and essays for over five decades.
Fear of Flying (1973)
The novel follows Isadora Wing — an American poet married to a psychoanalyst named Bennett Wing — as she attends a psychoanalytic conference in Vienna and begins an affair with Adrian Goodlove, a rakish English analyst who represents everything that her dutiful marriage does not: spontaneity, irresponsibility, and the promise of sexual freedom without consequence.
The novel’s most famous contribution to the culture is the “zipless fuck” — Isadora’s fantasy of a sexual encounter that is purely physical, free of the complications of personality, power, and emotional obligation. The concept became a catchphrase of the sexual revolution, though the novel itself is more ambivalent about it than the catchphrase suggests: Isadora discovers that the zipless fuck is more satisfying as a fantasy than as a reality, and the novel’s conclusion is not a celebration of sexual freedom but a return to the self — a woman standing alone, running a bath, and preparing to take responsibility for her own life.
Fear of Flying was praised by John Updike (who called Jong “a female Henry Miller”) and by many feminist readers and critics. It was attacked by others — some feminists objected to its focus on heterosexual desire and its protagonist’s dependence on men, while conservative critics dismissed it as pornographic. The novel’s reputation has fluctuated, but its importance as a cultural document and its genuine literary quality — Jong writes with intelligence, humour, and formal skill — are secure.
Subsequent Novels
How to Save Your Own Life (1977) continues Isadora’s story into Hollywood and divorce. Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (1980) is a picaresque novel set in eighteenth-century England — an audacious pastiche of Fielding and Defoe that is Jong’s most formally ambitious work. Parachutes & Kisses (1984) follows Isadora through her third marriage and middle age.
Poetry
Jong’s poetry — including Fruits & Vegetables (1971), Half-Lives (1973), Loveroot (1975), and Becoming Light (1991) — is formally accomplished and thematically consistent with her fiction: poems about the body, desire, food, domesticity, and the Jewish-American female experience. The poetry is more controlled and more emotionally precise than the novels, and it deserves wider recognition.
Critical Standing
Jong’s reputation has suffered from the same forces that afflict many commercially successful women writers: the assumption that popularity and literary quality are inversely related, and the tendency of literary culture to take male sexual confession (Roth, Updike, Miller) more seriously than female. Fear of Flying is a genuinely good novel — witty, structurally inventive, psychologically acute — and its place in the history of American fiction is secure.
Collecting Jong
Fear of Flying (1973, Holt, Rinehart and Winston) in first edition with dust jacket brings $100–$400. Fruits & Vegetables (1971, Holt, Rinehart and Winston) — her poetry debut — brings $30–$80. Fanny (1980) brings $15–$40. Signed copies are available.