Sylvia Plath Biography and latest books by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston on October 27, 1932, and spent her childhood in Winthrop, a seaside town in the Boston. Her mother’s parents were Austrian migrants, while her father, was an immigrant from Poland. He was a professor of biology at Boston University and an internationally known expert on bees. However, her father died in November 1940 after a protracted illness and her family moved to the more conservative suburb of Wellesley. Plath was essentially raised by her grandmother while her mother taught students at the medical-secretarial training program at Boston University.

At an early age, Sylvia began to write poems. In fact, she published her first poem at the tender age of eight. By the time she was 17 she was an experienced writer. Her first published work came in 1950, a short story in the magazine Seventeen entitled And Summer Will Not Come Again, while the Christian Science Monitor published a poem called Bitter Strawberries. That year Plath entered Smith College on a scholarship endowed by Olive Higgins Prouty, the novelist and author of Stella Dallas. The next year she won Mademoiselle magazine\'s fiction contest with a short story Sunday at the Mintons and was awarded two Smith poetry prizes and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1953, Esther returned home to her Boston suburb after working at a fashion magazine internship, where she made her first suicide attempt and was hospitalized for psychotherapy; these events, among other biographical details, are paralleled in The Bell Jar.

Plath graduated from Smith College with highest honors in 1955 and went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, in England on a Fulbright fellowship. The following year she married the English poet Ted Hughes and taught for two years as an English instructor at Smith College, her alma mater. In 1960 Plath returned to England with Hughes and published a collection of poems called The Colossus. Her second novel, The Bell Jar, was published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.

During the final three years of her life, Plath abandoned the restraints and conventions that marred much of her early work, and wrote with great speed. She produced numerous confessional poems of stark revelation, channeling her longstanding anxiety, confusion and doubt into poetic verses of great power and pathos. Nevertheless, at her creative peak Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963 in London.

The Bell Jar was reissued under Plath\'s own name in 1966, and reached American shores for the first time in 1971 after copyright problems delayed its publication in the United States. Several works were also published posthumously, including Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1971), Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977), and The Collected Poems (1981).
 

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