Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963), was an American poet and fiction writer. Her works emphasize her sharp insights, ironic wit, and painful feelings. They are especially sympathetic to the plight of women, young people, artists, misfits, and rebels. Plath died young, but she is generally considered one of the most powerful American writers to have emerged since the 1940’s.
Plath’s poems employ vivid, memorable images to depict a world of anguish. “Daddy” dramatizes the hate and love a young woman feels for her father. “Medusa” tells of a daughter’s troubled relationship with her mother. In “The Jailer,” a wife expresses anger at her brutal, self-centered husband. Poems such as “Ariel” and “Lady Lazarus” explore feelings of despair. “Three Women” presents the thoughts of women as they experience the pain and joy of childbirth.
Plath’s fiction, like her verse, often explores the dark side of modern life, though usually with humor. In The Bell Jar (1963), a college student comes to see her friends as hypocrites and her own values as false. After a suicide attempt, the student is able to discover new and more satisfying reasons for living. Plath’s short stories, collected in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977), focus on the central characters’ feelings of loneliness and uncertainty.
Plath was born in Boston on Oct. 27, 1932. Her father died when she was 8 years old, and her mother worked hard to earn a living. Plath graduated from Smith College in 1955. She married British poet Ted Hughes in 1956. Plath committed suicide on Feb. 11, 1963, at the age of 30. Though little known at the time of her death, she became famous with the publication of Ariel (1965), a collection of her poems. The Collected Poems (1981) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Plath’s writings include a volume of letters to her mother, Letters Home (1975); and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950-1962 (2000).
