Sylvia Plath Popular Books

Sylvia Plath Biography & Facts

Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts and the University of Cambridge, England, where she was a student at Newnham College. Plath later studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University, alongside poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England. Their relationship was tumultuous and, in her letters, Plath alleges abuse at his hands. They had two children before separating in 1962. Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with early versions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She ended her own life in 1963. Biography Early life and education Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was a second-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow, Germany. Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who wrote a book about bumblebees. On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born. In 1936 the family moved from 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, Massachusetts. Plath's mother, Aurelia, with Plath's maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived since 1920 in a section of Winthrop called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry. While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath published her first poem in the Boston Herald's children's section. Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers. At age 11, Plath began keeping a journal. In addition to writing, she showed early promise as an artist, winning an award for her paintings from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 1947. "Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed." Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Sylvia's eighth birthday, of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes. He had become ill shortly after a close friend died of lung cancer. Comparing the similarities between his friend's symptoms and his own, Otto became convinced that he, too, had lung cancer and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Raised as a Unitarian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life. Her father was buried in Winthrop Cemetery in Massachusetts. A visit to her father's grave later prompted Plath to write the poem "Electra on Azalea Path". After Otto's death, Aurelia moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1942. Plath commented in "Ocean 1212-W", one of her final works, that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth". Plath attended Bradford Senior High School, which is now Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, graduating in 1950. Just after graduating from high school, she had her first national publication in The Christian Science Monitor. College years and depression In 1950, Plath attended Smith College, a private women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where she excelled academically. While at Smith, she lived in Lawrence House, and a plaque can be found outside her old room. She edited The Smith Review. After her third year of college, Plath was awarded a coveted position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not what she had hoped for, and many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar. She was furious at not being at a meeting that the editor, Cyrilly Abels, had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a writer whose work she loved, according to one of her boyfriends, "more than life itself". She loitered around the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel for two days, hoping to meet Thomas, but he was already on his way home. A few weeks later, she slashed her legs "to see if she had enough courage to kill herself." During this time, she was not accepted into a Harvard University writing seminar with author Frank O'Connor. Following ECT for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt on August 24, 1953, by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother's sleeping pills. She survived this first suicide attempt, later writing that she "blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion". She spent the next six months in psychiatric care, receiving more electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Ruth Beuscher. Her stay at McLean Hospital and her Smith Scholarship were paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty, who also recovered from a mental breakdown. According to Plath's biographer Andrew Wilson, Olive Higgins Prouty "would take Dr Tillotson to task for the badly managed ECT, blaming him for Sylvia's suicide attempt". Plath seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college. In January 1955, she submitted her thesis The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels, and in June graduated from Smith with an A.B., summa cum laude. She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society, and had an IQ of around 160. She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the two women-only colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, where she continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard. She spent her first-year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe. Career and marriage Plath met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956. In a 1961 BBC interview now held by the British Library Sound Archive, Plath describes how she met Hughes: I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met...Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later...We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feel.... Discover the Sylvia Plath popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sylvia Plath books.