![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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