Erica Jong

Her breakthrough novel, "Fear of Flying" (1973), is her most famous work, selling over 20 million copies worldwide. The novel, and its sequels "How to Save Your Own Life" and "Parachutes and Kisses," explore female sexuality and the conflicts of womanhood in the late 1960s and early 1970s America, becoming central to second-wave feminism. Jong's fiction often draws on her own life: her marriage to Allan Jong, a Japanese-American psychiatrist, appears in "Fear of Flying," and her time living on an army base in Heidelberg, Germany from 1966 to 1969, as well as her visits to Venice, have also made their way into her writing. Beyond fiction, she has translated works by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, which are studied in college courses, and has published several volumes of poetry, some respectable, some less so.

Jong was married four times, a fact she has not shied away from documenting in her work. Her first marriage, to Michael Werthman, was brief and occurred while she was at Barnard. In 1966, she married Allan Jong, and later, in 1977, she married Jonathan Fast, with whom she had a daughter. Her current husband is Kenneth David Burrows, a New York litigator. She graduated from Barnard College and earned a master's degree in 18th-century English literature from Columbia in 1965. She is Caucasian, born in the United States. Her irreverent wit and willingness to tackle taboo subjects have defined her career, making her a polarizing but influential figure in American letters.