Sylvia Plath

American · b. 1932

Sylvia Plath was a poet of ferocious precision whose only novel, The Bell Jar, turned her own breakdown and recovery into the defining fictional account of a brilliant young woman's depression. Published weeks before her death in 1963 and later crowned by the posthumous Pulitzer for her poetry, she became one of the 20th century's most studied and mythologized writers.