The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller.

JONG, Erica.

$400.00

Item Number: 142504

London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.

First edition of Jong’s appreciation of the life and legacy of Henry Miller. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the title page in the year of publication to her fourth husband, “For Ken The only husband I still liked after 4 years! (What a confession!) I love you, too – Erica 29 March 1993.” The recipient, American litigator Kenneth David Burrows married American novelist Erica Jong in 1989. Jong remains best known for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying which became famously controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. Written in the first person and narrated by its protagonist, 29-year-old American poet Isadora Wing, Fear of Flying was written in the throes of the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s and encapsulated the movement’s redefinition of female sexuality. In interviews, Jong stated: “At the time I wrote Fear of Flying, there was not a book that said women are romantic, women are intellectual, women are sexual—and brought all those things together… What [Isadora is] looking for is how to be a whole human being, a body and a mind, and that is what women were newly aware they needed in 1973.” The novel remains a feminist classic and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. From the library of Erica Jong and Ken Burrows. Fine in a near fine dust jacket.

Jong's The Devil at Large celebrates the ebullience, the iconoclasm, the contradictions, the humour, and above all the freedom that defined the life and art of an outrageous, romantic, radical, unAmerican innocent abroad in Bohemia. More, it reveals the convictions shared by Jong and Miller - that one must accept dung to have angels, and that the truest virtue is to be 'on the side of life.'