1. Sylvia Plath 1932-1963

2.  Plath was born in Boston. Her father was a professor of biology and he was from Poland. Her mother taught office skills and was from Austria.  Her father died of complications from diabetes when she was eight years old.

3.  Plath started writing poems and stories in elementary school. She published her first poem in a Boston newspaper around the time of her father’s death.  She was very persistent about getting her work published. She was rejected by Seventeen magazine 45 times before finally getting published in 1950.

4.  She was awarded a scholarship to attend Smith College and in her junior year won a prize for fiction writing from Mademoiselle magazine and was awarded with a summer internship as a guest editor.  After that summer, Plath became overcome with depression and attempted suicide. This experience was the basis for her novel The Bell Jar.  She was treated with psychiatric treatment and electroshock therapy. Plath was actually bipolar, but this was before effective drug therapy was available.

5.  After graduating from Smith, Plath went to Cambridge University in England on a Fulbright fellowship.  While there she met the English poet Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. They lived in Boston at first and moved to London in 1959.  In 1960, Plath published her first book of poetry The Colossus and had a daughter, Frieda. She gave birth to her son, Nicholas, in 1962.

6.  In 1963, Plath separated from her husband and lived with her two children in an unheated London flat.  In February, Plath’s depression returned and she attempted suicide again, this time succeeding.