Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath published her first poem at the age of eight, in the Boston Sunday Herald, the same year her father died. Born in 1932, Sylvia Plath’s short life ended in 1963 as a result of suicide. From her first collection of poems, The Colossus (1960), through the collections published after her death, Plath is considered one of America’s most immediate and personal poets. Plath attended Smith College, where she won a fiction contest that provided a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine in New York. She used her college and working experiences to inform her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, which was originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. A Fulbright grant won her acceptance to Cambridge University, where she met, and then married in 1956, the English poet Ted Hughes. Plath was separated from Hughes for her most prolific period of writing from 1961 to 1963, when she was living in a small London flat with her two children. In addition to the poetry, Plath’s radio play, Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices, was presented on the BBC in 1962. Plath had tried to commit suicide before, as a young woman and as an adult. In 1963, she gassed herself in the London flat’s kitchen. After her death, Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1972), Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1979, short fiction) solidified her reputation. In 1981, Ted Hughes edited The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, which won a Pulitzer Prize.
