Sylvia Plath Biography

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short storey writer who lived from October 27, 1932, until February 11, 1963. She is credited for promoting confessional poetry, and her most well-known works are The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical book published soon before her death in 1963. The Collected Poems, which includes previously unreleased works, was published in 1981. Plath was the fourth person to earn the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry posthumously for this work, which she received in 1982. 

Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Smith College and Newnham College in Cambridge, England. Sylvia Plath married Ted Hughes in 1956, a fellow poet, and the two lived together in the United States and subsequently England. They had two children. 

(Image will be uploaded soon)

An image of Sylvia Plath

Life of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 27, October 1932. Her mother, Aurelia Plath, was a second-generation American of Austrian ancestry, and her father, Otto Plath, was a German-born second-generation American from Grabow. Plath's father was a bumblebee expert and a professor of biology at Boston University who wrote a book about them. Warren Plath, Plath's younger brother, was born on April 27, 1935. In 1936, the family relocated to 92 Johnson Avenue in Winthrop, Massachusetts, from 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Plath's first poem was published in the Boston Herald's children's section when she was eight years old, while she was still living in Winthrop. Plath wrote several poems in regional publications and newspapers throughout the next few years. Plath began writing a notebook when she was eleven years old. She was a gifted artist and writer from an early age, obtaining a Scholastic Art & Writing Award for her works in 1947. "Even as a child, Plath was motivated by the desire to succeed." Plath was also intelligent, with an IQ of roughly 160.

Otto Plath died of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after his eighth birthday. He became unwell soon after a close buddy passed away from lung cancer. Otto became persuaded that he, too, had lung cancer after comparing his friend's symptoms to his own, but he did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Plath, who was reared as a Unitarian, lost faith after her father died and spent the rest of her life uncertain about religion. Her father was laid to rest in Massachusetts' Winthrop Cemetery. Plath's poem "Electra on Azalea Path" was inspired by a visit to her father's grave. In 1942, Aurelia moved her children and parents to 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley, Massachusetts, after Otto's death. Plath wrote in one of her final writing pieces that her first nine years "shut themselves off like a ship in a bottle, lovely, inaccessible, outmoded, a great, white flying myth, a fine, white flying tale." Plath graduated from Wellesley's Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) in 1950. She earned her first national article in the Christian Science Monitor shortly after graduating from high school.

College Years and Depression

Plath enrolled at Smith College, a Massachusetts-based private women's liberal arts college, in 1950. Academically, she was a standout. She lived in Lawrence House while at Smith, and a plaque may be located outside her old room. She was the Smith Review's editor. After her third year of college, during which she spent a month in New York City, Plath was offered a coveted position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine. The experience was not what she had expected, and many of the events of that summer became the basis for her novel The Bell Jar. She was denied admittance to the Harvard writing seminar during this time. 

Career and Marriage

The pair married on June 16, 1956, at St George the Martyr, Holborn in London (now in the Borough of Camden), with Plath's mother in attendance, and spent their honeymoon in Paris and Benidorm. In October, Plath returned to Newnham to begin her second year. Plath and Hughes went to the United States in June 1957, and Plath began teaching at Smith College, in September. She found it difficult to teach and write at the same time, so the pair relocated to Boston in the middle of 1958. Plath got work as a receptionist at Massachusetts General Hospital's psychiatric ward and attended poet Robert Lowell's creative writing seminars in the evenings (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck). Plath was encouraged by both Lowell and Sexton to write about her experiences, which she did. She talked candidly about her sadness with Lowell, which inspired her to write from a feminine perspective. 

Plath began to think of herself as a more serious poet and short-story writer. Plath and Hughes met W. S. Merwin, a poet who loved their work and became a longtime friend, at this period. In late 1959, Plath and Hughes visited the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, on their way across Canada and the United States.

Plath claims that it was here that she learnt "to be honest to my weirdnesses," although she was still hesitant to write confessionally about extremely intimate and private material. In December 1959, the couple returned to England and stayed at 3 Chalcot Square in London, near the Primrose Hill neighbourhood of Regent's Park, where an English Heritage plaque commemorates Plath's occupancy. Sylvia Plath published The Colossus, her first collection of poetry, and Frieda was born on 1, April in the year of 1960.

Sylvia Plath Autobiography Books

• Sylvia Plath Red Comet Biography Book (Red Comet by Heather Clark)

Sylvia Plath's life has been subsumed by her afterlife since her suicide in 1963, writes Heather Clark in her superb new book "Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath” (Sylvia Plath red comet). “Caught between icon and cliché, she has been mythologized and pathologized as a high priestess of poetry preoccupied with death in movies, television, and biographies. ” If Clark's purpose in creating this massive book, which took nearly a decade to complete, was to replace that weary, overworked symbol with a three-dimensional individual, she has achieved far beyond the scope of all prior Plath biographies in "Red Comet” (Sylvia Plath red comet). 

• Rough Magic Sylvia Plath (Rough Magic by Paul Alexander)

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) has been celebrated for her impeccable and brutal poetry, which excels in describing the most extreme limits of Plath's cognition and desires, since her suicide at the age of thirty. The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel, and collections such as The Colossus, Ariel, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Poems are among her works. Rough Magic delves into the events of Plath's life, including her traumatic marriage to English poet Ted Hughes, in a biography that stands alone in its compassionate depiction of this fiercely talented, tragically damaged writer, based on exclusive interviews and significant archive research.

Works

The Colossus

Plath had been short-listed numerous times in the Yale Younger Poets book competition and had poems published in Harper's, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement by the time Heinemann published The Colossus and Other Poems in the UK in late 1960. She had a contract with The New Yorker, and all of the poems in The Colossus had already been published in major US and British periodicals.

The Bell Jar

Plath's semi-autobiographical novel, which her mother tried to prevent from being published, was published in 1963 and in the United States in 1971. "What I've done is tie together events from my own life, fictionalising to add colour," she wrote to her mother, "but I think it will convey how isolated a person feels when he is having a breakdown."

Double Exposure

Plath began writing on another literary work, Double Exposure, in 1963 after The Bell Jar was published. The manuscript was lost circa 1970 when it was never published. Plath left behind "some 130 pages of another novel, provisionally titled Double Exposure," according to Hughes. In Luke Ferretter's book Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study, theories abound concerning what happened to the incomplete piece.

Sylvia Plath Death

Plath fell into a deep depression and struggled with her mental illness and authored The Bell Jar (1963), her only novel, which is based on her life and follows the mental breakdown of a young lady. The work was published under the alias Victoria Lucas by Plath. She also wrote the poetry for the Ariel (1965) collection, which was published after her death. On 11, February 1963, Sylvis Plath died by suicide.

Plath began writing poetry when she was eight years old, with her first piece appearing in the Boston Traveller. She had written over 50 short tales and had been published in a variety of periodicals by the time she enrolled at Smith College. In truth, Plath spent much of her life wishing to create prose and stories, and she considered poetry to be an afterthought. In the end, though, she was unable to publish writing. She majored in English at Smith and received all of the major writing and scholarship awards. She also won a summer editor position at Mademoiselle, a young women's magazine, and the Glascock Prize for Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea when she graduated in 1955.