Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer, born in Jamaica Plain, Boston, in 1932. She showed literary talent early, publishing poems and stories while still at school, and went on to study at Smith College on scholarship. She later studied at Cambridge in England, where she met the poet Ted Hughes, whom she married. She lived in both England and the United States, and had two children. Her poetry is known for its intensity, sharp imagery and control of sound, and for its frank treatment of family, marriage, motherhood, illness and the inner life. She also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel and many stories, essays and journals. She struggled with depression through much of her adult life and died in London in February 1963, aged thirty. Most of her best-known poems appeared after her death, and she is now regarded as one of the central voices of twentieth-century poetry, a major influence on confessional writing and on later generations of readers and writers.