EXCLUSIVE: Erica Jong on Writing and Collecting Banned Books
What a perfect way to wrap up Banned Books Week! A big thanks to the awesome team at Open Road Media for sending this our way. Check out their full line-up of Banned Books Week coverage.
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BANNED BOOKS AND ME
Fear of Flying was once a banned book. The first typesetter refused to set type in 1973. The networks refused TV ads in 1973 and 1974. Italy seized the book in 1975.
(My illustrated book, Witches, was even more banned and burned than Fear of Flying. Adolescent wiccans often send me copies of Witches that their benighted parents or priests burned.)
Often banned books become classics.
My husband and I collect banned books, so I am thrilled to have a first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, a first edition of Ulysses by James Joyce, a first edition of Whoroscope by Samuel Beckett, and a first edition of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (the first great banned lesbian novel). I also have Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov — the Olympia Press edition that book-lovers brought home from Paris in the 1950’s.
We’re always in search of important banned books to add to our collection. Being banned turns out to be a great compliment to the author.
Banned no more,
Erica Jong
Erica Jong is an award-winning poet, novelist, and memoirist, and one of the nation’s most distinctive voices on women and sexuality. She is the author of the ground-breaking novel Fear of Flying. She can be found on Twitter at @ericajong and on Facebook. For a chance to win Fear of Flying and 29 other banned books, enter here
