Barnard College named her its Woman of Achievement in 1987, and from 1991 to 1993 she served as president of the Authors' Guild of the United States. Her works have been translated into twenty-seven languages, suggesting that they travel well and that her rapport with her audience is not culturally bound.
The second daughter of a painter mother, Eda Mirsky, and a musician-turned-businessman father, Seymour Mann, Jong was born on 26 March 1942 and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As an undergraduate at Barnard College, she edited its literary magazine and produced poetry programs for the campus radio station. In 1965 she completed her M.A. in eighteenth-century literature at Columbia University. She eventually dropped out of the Ph.D. program to devote herself entirely to writing, but her fascination with the eighteenth-century novel would resurface in Fanny
Fear of Flying, like many of Jong's other novels, includes obvious autobiographical elements. For instance, Isadora Wing of Fear of Flying and Jong attended the High School of Music and Art, Barnard College, and the writing division of the School of the Arts at Columbia. Moreover, both had married -- Isadora to Brian and Jong to Michael Werthman -- before becoming involved with psychiatrists of Chinese descent.
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