Born and raised in New York, where in 1965 she earned an MA in English Literature from Columbia University, Erica Jong, née Mann, began her literary activity in 1971 with a collection of poems, Fruit and Vegetables, but achieved international success in 1973 with her first novel Fear of Flying (1975) centred on the burning issues of nineteen- seventies feminism, which sold over twenty million copies and has been translated into forty languages. In her two subsequent novels, How to Save Your Own Life (1977) and Parachutes and Kisses (1984), the story of Isadora Wing, protagonist of the first bestseller, takes on a decisively personal tone. Also autobiographical and in the feminine are her following works Witches (1981), Megan’s Book of Divorce (1984), Any Woman’s Blues (1989), Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir (1994), Inventing Memory: a Novel of Mothers and Daughters (1997), What Do Women Want? Bread Roses Sex Power (1998) and Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life (2006), a tale of Jong’s own life from her earliest experiences in the literary world to her intellectual life and love experiences. Sappho’s Leap (2003) is instead an imaginary and introspective reconstruction of the life of the poetess from Lesbo. Her latest novel, Fear of Dying (2015), is a bold, witty and ferociously portrait of a mature woman in the twentieth century. Jong has received numerous international prizes, including the Bess Hokin Prize for poetry, the Sigmund Freud Prize for literature, the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature and the Fernanda Pivano Prize. She lives between New York, Connecticut and Vermont with her fourth husband and her daughter.