Sylvia Plath
(1932–1963)

Despite her success as a poet, Sylvia Plath lived a very short, unhappy life. In many of her poems, she expresses her intense feelings of despair and deep inner pain. Born in Boston, Plath wrote poetry and received scholastic and literary awards as a child. Although she suffered a nervous breakdown during her junior year, she graduated with highest honors from Smith College. She went on to attend Cambridge University in England. In 1956, she married English poet Ted Hughes, and, after a year in the United States, the couple settled in England. Plath's first volume of poetry, The Colossus (1960), was the only collection of her work to appear during her lifetime. Two more books of her poetry and her novel, The Bell Jar (1963), were published posthumously.

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