Erica Jong, American poet and novelist, was born in 1942 in New York City where she grew up on the Upper West Side. Like the protagonist of her novels, Isadora Wing, she attended the High School of Music and Art, Barnard College, and the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and married and divorced a psychiatrist husband of Chinese descent. She taught English at the City College of New York before traveling in Germany, and lived in Heidelberg where she taught at the University of Maryland's Overseas Division. Her first book of poems, Fruits & Vegetables, was published in 1971, and two years later she won the Alice Faye di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America as well as a writing fellowship from the Creative Artists Program Service for her second book of poetry, Half-Lives. Poems in this collection were also awarded the Bess...