Now famous for her ritual flirtations with death, Sylvia Plath has emerged as a significant fig- ure in contemporary American literature in the two and a half decades since her suicide on 11 February 1963. Her reputation as an accomplished and...

In his introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-62 (1982), her husband, poet Ted Hughes, wrote that she wore "many masks" but that he believes he knew her "real self" -- "the self I had married, after all, and lived with and knew well." Yet...

Although most of her creative energies were directed toward poetry, Sylvia Plath produced one novel, The Bell Jar (1963), a striking work which has contributed to her reputation as a significant figure in contemporary American literature. A thinly...

In "Three Women," the final poem of Winter Trees (1971), Sylvia Plath speaks through the voice of a woman in a maternity ward, whose words provide a fitting statement for the poet's singular fixation with annihilation: A power is growing on me an old...

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), poet and novelist, explored her obsessions with death, self, and nature in works that expressed her ambivalent attitudes toward the universe. Sylvia Plath was born in Boston's Memorial Hospital on October 27, 1932, to Aurelia...