Sylvia Plath
born October 27, 1932, Boston,
Massachusetts, U.S.
died February 11, 1963, London, England
American poet and novelist whose
best-known works are preoccupied with
alienation, death, and self-destruction.
Plath published her first poem at age eight.
She entered and won many literary contests
and while still in high school sold her
first poem, to Seventeen magazine. She
entered Smith College on a scholarship in
1951 and was a cowinner of the Mademoiselle
magazine fiction contest in 1952. Despite
her remarkable artistic, academic, and
social success at Smith, Plath suffered from
severe depression and underwent a period of
psychiatric hospitalization. She graduated
from Smith with highest honours in 1955 and
went on to Newnham College in Cambridge,
England, on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1956
she married the English poet Ted Hughes. For
the following two years she was an
instructor in English at Smith College.
In 1960, shortly after Plath and her
husband returned to England, her first
collection of poems appeared as The
Colossus. Her second book, a strongly
autobiographical novel titled The Bell Jar,
was published in 1963 under the pseudonym
“Victoria Lucas.” The book describes the
mental breakdown, attempted suicide, and
eventual recovery of a young college girl.
During her last three years Plath
abandoned the restraints and conventions
that had bound much of her early work. She
wrote with great speed, producing poems of
stark self-revelation and confession. The
anxiety, confusion, and doubt that haunted
her were transmuted into verses of great
power and pathos borne on flashes of
incisive wit. In 1963, after a burst of
productivity, Plath took her own life. Ariel
(1965), a collection of her later poems,
helped spark the growth of something of a
cult devoted to Plath. The reissue of The
Bell Jar under her own name in 1966 and the
appearance of small collections of
previously unpublished poems, including
Crossing the Water (1971) and Winter Trees
(1971), were welcomed by critics and the
public alike. Johnny Panic and the Bible of
Dreams, a book of short stories and prose,
was published in 1977, and The Collected
Poems, which includes many previously
unpublished poems, appeared in 1981. Plath
had kept a journal for much of her life, and
in 2000 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia
Plath, covering the years from 1950 to 1962,
was published. A biographical film of Plath
starring Gwyneth Paltrow (Sylvia) appeared
in 2003. In 2009 Plath’s radio play Three
Women (1962) was staged professionally for
the first time.
