Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
Author of The Bell Jar
About the Author
Sylvia Plath's best poetry was produced, tragically, as she pondered self-destruction---in her poems as well as her life---and she eventually committed suicide. She had an extraordinary impact on British as well as American poetry in the few years before her death, and affected many poets, show more particularly women, in the generation after. She is a confessional poet, influenced by the approach of Robert Lowell. Born in Boston, a graduate of Smith College, Plath attended Newnham College, Cambridge University, on a Fulbright Fellowship and married the British poet Ted Hughes. Of her first collection,The Colossus and Other Poems (1962), the Times Literary Supplement remarked, "Plath writes from phrase to phrase as well as with an eye on the larger architecture of the poem; each line, each sentence is put together with a good deal of care for the springy rhythm, the arresting image and---most of all, perhaps---the unusual word." Plath's second book of poetry, Ariel, written in 1962 in a last fever of passionate creative activity, was published posthumously in 1965 and explores dimensions of women's anger and sexuality in groundbreaking new ways. Plath's struggles with women's issues, in the days before the second wave of American feminism, became legendary in the 1970s, when a new generation of women readers and writers turned to her life as well as her work to understand the contradictory pressures of ambitious and talented women in the 1950s. The Bell Jar---first published under a pseudonym in 1963 and later issued under Plath's own name in England in 1966---is an autobiographical novel describing an ambitious young woman's efforts to become a "real New York writer" only to sink into mental illness and despair at her inability to operate within the narrow confines of traditional feminine expectations. Plath was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. In recent years, there have been a number of biographies and critical evaluations of Plath's work. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Disambiguation Notice:
Also published under the name Sylvia Plath Hughes and Victoria Lucas. Please do not combine this author page with the author page for Plath, as there are other authors with that surname. thank you.
Works by Sylvia Plath
American Poetry Now: A Selection of the Best Poems by Modern American Writers (Critical Quarterly Poetry Supplement,… (1961) 7 copies
Stings: Original Drafts of the Dreams of the Poem Facsimile Reproduced from the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith… (1983) 7 copies
Mad Girl's Love Song 4 copies
3 storie per bambini 3 copies
Le muse inquietanti e altre poesie 3 copies
The Bell Jar and Other Works by Sylvia Plath: The Colossus, Ariel, Collected Poems and Juvenilia 2 copies
The Poetry of Sylvia Plath 2 copies
Fiesta Melons 2 copies
Kambana e qelqtë 2 copies
Terno Tanto Faz Como Tanto Fez, O 2 copies
Uncollected poems 1 copy
Child: [poem] 1 copy
The green rock 1 copy
The Prose of Sylvia Plath 1 copy
Noveller 1 copy
Poesia reunida 1 copy
Ariel și alte poeme 1 copy
The Colussus 1 copy
Espejo 1 copy
Plath letters - Heptonstall 1 copy
Sylvia Plath reads her works 1 copy
POEMS OF SYLVIA PLATH 1 copy
L'Ombre 1 copy
Black Rook in Rainy Weather (included in The Norton Introduction to Literature - 5th Edition) 1 copy
Initiation 1 copy
Morning Song {poem} 1 copy
Plath Sylvia 1 copy
Letters of Sylvia Plath 1 copy
Pursuit 1 copy
Plath, Sylvia Archive 1 copy
Above the oxbow 1 copy
The World of Sylvia Plath 1 copy
The colossus. Poems 1 copy
Associated Works
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (1995) — Contributor, some editions — 915 copies
Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement (1970) — Contributor — 571 copies
The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists (2000) — Contributor, some editions — 550 copies
From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas 1900-2002 (2002) — Contributor — 172 copies
Poetry Speaks Expanded: Hear Poets Read Their Own Work from Tennyson to Plath (2007) — Contributor — 148 copies
The Graphic Canon, Vol. 3: From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest (2013) — Contributor — 146 copies
An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine (2000) — Contributor — 131 copies
Cape Cod Stories: Tales from Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard (1996) — Contributor — 52 copies
About Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, Poetry, and Essays (1973) — Contributor — 26 copies
In'hui, No.9 — Contributor — 1 copy
Ein Haus mit vielen Zimmern: Autorinnen erzählen vom Schreiben (edition fünf 27) (German Edition) (2015) — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Hughes, Sylvia Plath (married name)
- Other names
- Lucas, Victoria
Hughes, Sylvia Plath - Birthdate
- 1932-10-27
- Date of death
- 1963-02-11
- Burial location
- Heptonstall Parish Churchyard, West Yorkshire, England, UK,
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Place of death
- London, England, UK
- Cause of death
- suicide
- Places of residence
- Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, USA
Winthrop, Massachusetts, USA
Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
London, England, UK
Devon, England, UK (show all 8)
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
Northampton, Massachusetts, USA - Education
- Smith College (AB|English|1955)
Newnham College, Cambridge (MA) - Occupations
- poet
teacher
novelist
short-story writer - Relationships
- Hughes, Ted (husband)
Hughes, Frieda (daughter)
Lowell, Robert (teacher)
Alvarez, Al (friend)
Sexton, Anne (friend) - Awards and honors
- Glascock Poetry Prize (1955)
Fulbright Fellowship (Cambridge, 1955)
Pulitzer Prize (1982) - Short biography
- 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 two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel, as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. In 1981 The Collected Poems were published, including many previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the first to receive this honour posthumously.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath studied at Smith College in Massachusetts and at Newnham College in Cambridge, England. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England. They had two children before separating in 1962.
Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with electroconvulsive therapy. She died by suicide in 1963. - Disambiguation notice
- Also published under the name Sylvia Plath Hughes and Victoria Lucas.
Please do not combine this author page with the author page for Plath, as there are other authors with that surname. thank you.
Members
Discussions
the bell jar in Club Read 2023 (July 2023)
Interested to swap replacement titles in Canada in Folio Society Devotees (October 2022)
Fine press Plath in Fine Press Forum (March 2022)
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Statistics
- Works
- 130
- Also by
- 61
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The first two things I noticed about this short novel was that the story itself seemed to very anecdotal. Small, almost unimportant events and observations simply strung together, with no real through-story. The other was that the writing itself is gorgeous.
So this sits—for me, at least—almost in the same region as, say, Kerouac's ON THE ROAD in that the only specific story is the main character's experience.
Yet, for all of that, as the story gets darker and darker, the book is impossible to put down. And knowing that this was the last full novel she wrote, I found myself wondering what brilliant offerings Plath could have produced, if she'd had more time.… (more)