In her 1973 novel Fear of Flying, Erica Jong created the term “the zipless fuck” to question whether modern women, like men, could finally have sex with no strings attached. Born Erica Mann, Jong graduated Barnard College in 1963 and went on to earn a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University two years later. She published her first poetry collection, Fruits & Vegetables, in 1971 and went on to write numerous poetry collections, children’s books, memoirs, and novels, including Megan’s Two Houses: A Story of Adjustment (1984), The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller (1993), Fear of Fifty (1994), and Fear of Dying (2015). But she is best known for Fear of Flying, which made her reputation as a literary woman writer unafraid to talk openly about sex and the changing norms created by the sexual revolution and the feminist movement. Among her awards, she has been honored with the 1975 Sigmund Freud Award for Literature and the 1998 United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature.