Sylvia Plath

Encounter one of the most powerful and enduring voices in twentieth-century literature with Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), the American poet and novelist whose work burns with a fierce, confessional intensity that has never been equalled. Plath transformed the raw material of her own psychological experience — depression, ambition, identity, womanhood, and the desperate desire to create — into poetry and prose of extraordinary beauty and precision. Her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963), published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas just weeks before her death, is a landmark of twentieth-century fiction — a searing, darkly funny account of a young woman’s mental breakdown that has never gone out of print. Her poetry collection Ariel (1965), published posthumously, is one of the most celebrated and influential poetry collections in the English language. Her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Essential, unforgettable, and utterly alive.