Jong, Erica

Erica Jong is an American author born in New York as Erica Mann to Jewish parents of Polish and Russian descent. Her father was a musician who later became a travelling salesman and importer of giftware, her mother was a textile designer who had graduated from the National Academy of Design. Erica Jong grew up in Manhattan where her family lived until 1959. She was educated at the High School of Music and Art in New York and she read literature at Columbia University, graduating in 1963, after which she taught at City College, New York. She married her first husband, Michael Werthman, in 1963. In 1966, she married Allan Jong, a psychoanalyst. The couple lived in Heidelberg, Germany until 1969. Erica Jong has been married four times. She has a daughter, Molly, with the author Jonathan Fast.