Jong has often described how Aaron Asher, the editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston who published her first poetry collection, encouraged her to write a novel in the voice of her poems.
The couple lived in Heidelberg, Germany during his military service from 1966 to 1969 they divorce in 1975. She describes him as “handsome, sexy, nonverbal,” and “the antidote to Michael’s craziness” ( Fear of Fifty). After he suffered what Jong called a breakdown and was hospitalized, she had her marriage annulled and soon married Allan Jong, a Chinese-American psychiatrist. After graduating in 1963, she received a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to pursue a Master’s degree in English literature at Columbia, where she specialized in eighteenth-century British literature and wrote a thesis on “The Theme of Women in the Poetry of Pope.” While in graduate school she married Michael Werthman, who worked for the publisher Prentice-Hall. In the early 1960s, Jong attended Barnard College, where she took writing workshops with the poet Robert Pack, earned election to Phi Beta Kappa, and edited a literary magazine. Her father always supported her desire to write, reminding her that all she needed was a pencil and a blank piece of paper to pursue her vocation. There she learned to paint beside her immigrant grandfather in his studio while he sang Russian folk ballads and Red Army songs (though he would “rage and chase down the stairs” if she “failed to take painting seriously enough”) (Jong, Fear of Fifty). Jong had a comfortable childhood on the Upper West Side, where the family home was run by her grandmother and a maid from Jamaica. Jong’s parents started a successful business together, designing and marketing porcelain objects, including Blue Danube dinnerware and Seymour Mann dolls. Her father, Seymour Mann, had been a professional musician as a young man, publishing songs and performing as a percussionist on Broadway in Cole Porter’s Jubilee (1935), in which he performed in the band that debuted “Begin the Beguine.” Jong’s mother, Eda Mirsky Mann, was a visual artist, born in London to a Russian Jewish immigrant family.
Erica Jong was born on March 26, 1942, in New York City, the second of three daughters in an artistically inclined Jewish family.
0 kommentar(er)
