Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry. She is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar (1963), a semi-autobiographical novel published one month before her suicide. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection, Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth person to receive this honour posthumously.
Born in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, Plath graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and then the University of Cambridge in England, where she was a Fulbright student at Newnham College. In 1959, Plath took a creative writing seminar with Robert Lowell at Boston University, alongside poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Within this seminar, Plath, Lowell, and Sexton, whilst starting with ...
