1. ENGLISH 11 Sylvia Plath

2. Early Life Born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto, who was her professor. Her father died when she was eight years old as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined Plath’s relationships and her poems, especially her elegaic and infamous poem “Daddy.”

3. Plath as a Young Adult Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of eleven and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor 1950, just after she graduated from high school. Enrolled at Smith College in 1950

4. Adult Life Plath was an exceptional student, despite going through a deep depression in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt. She graduated summa cum laude in 1955. Moved to Cambridge, England on a Fullbright Scholarship after graduation Met English poet Ted Hughes at a party in early 1956. They were married on June 16, 1956.

5. Adult Life Returned to Massachusetts in 1957 and began studying with poet Robert Lowell First collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in America Returned to England, where she gave birth to her children, Freida and Nicholas, in 1960 and 1962

6. Plath’s Battle with Depression In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for another woman. Plath went into a deep depression and wrote most of the poems that would compromise Published the semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963. The novel tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a gifted young woman who suffers a mental breakdown during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine.

7. A Tragic Ending On February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then committed suicide using her gas oven. Colossus was the only collection of her poetry published while Plath was alive. In addition to Ariel, Ted Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously. The Collected Poems was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. Plath was the first poet to posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize.