Erica Jong's first novel, Fear of Flying (1973), made her one of the central figures of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Her frank and explicit depictions of women's sexual desire shocked the world and gained her the praise of everyone from Playboy editors to John Updike. But women have given her a more mixed reception. While her many works of fiction and poetry about women fulfilling their fantasies of sexual abandon played well among the newly liberated generation of women in the 1970s, feminists of the 1980s and 1990s have challenged her promotion of anonymous sex for its own sake and her claim to speak for baby-boomer women's sexual desires. Nonetheless, her fame rests on the fact that she brought the difficulties of women trying to balance love, sex, self-development, and creativity to the attention of a mass audience.

Jong grew up in an...