Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was an influential American poet and writer known for her intensely personal and confessional style. Born in Boston on October 27, 1932, she was the daughter of Otto Plath (a German immigrant and biology professor specializing in bees) and Aurelia Schober Plath. Her father’s strict nature and untimely death in 1940 deeply affected her (most notably immortalized in the poem “Daddy” ). Plath was precociously literary: she published her first poem at age eight, entered and won numerous writing contests, and by high school had sold poetry to The Christian Science Monitor and a story to Seventeen magazine. She excelled at Smith College (graduating summa cum laude in 1955) and earned a Fulbright to study at Cambridge University, England. During her studies at Cambridge, Plath met the English poet Ted Hughes; they married on June 16, 1956. The couple had two children (Frieda and Nicholas) and moved between the US and England. Back in Massachusetts in 1957, Plath...