American writer whose best-known poems are noted for their personal imagery and intense focus. Plath wrote only two books before her suicide at the age of 31.

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston as the daughter of German immigrant parents. Her father was a professor of biology at Boston University. He has been characterized as authoritarian and died of diabetes in 1940 when Plath was eight years old. Her mother, Aurelia, worked at two jobs to support Sylvia and her brother Warren, but in her diary Plath reveals her hatred for her mother.

Her first awarded story, Sunday at the Mintons, was published in 1952 while she was at college in magazine Mademoiselle. Plath worked in 1953 on the college editorial board at the same magazine and suffered a mental breakdown which led to a suicide attempt. She described this period of her live in THE BELL JAR, her autobiographical novel, which was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963, a month before her death.

After winning a Fulbright scholarship, Plath attended Newnham College, Cambridge (England). She met there in 1956 the poet Ted Hughes (see "Before us stands yesterday."). They first met at a student party, where she bit Hughes on the cheek, really hard. It set the tone to their tumultuous relationship. Plath decided to be a good wife, but Hughes was not the ideal husband she imagined: he was moody, penchant for nosepicking, and dressed slovenly. Also Plath's suspicions of Hughes's infidelity burdened her.

When Ted Hughes abandoned her for an another woman, Assia Gutmann Wevill, the wife of the Canadian poet David Wevill, fantasies of self-destruction took over of Plath's resolution. Wevill was German-born, sophisticated woman, with film-star looks. Near the end of her life, Plath burned hundreds of pages of a work in progress. In a letter to her mother Plath complained that Hughes had left her in poverty, but according to Elaine Feinstein, whose well-balanced on Hughes appeared in 2001, he gave her all their joint savings.

Plath died in London on February 11, 1963; she committed suicide. Hughes's name was chipped off her tombstone, and his poetry readings were disrupted by shouts of "murderer."During her career as writer Plath was loosely linked to the confessional poets, a term used to describe among others Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton (1928-74, committed suicide), and John Berryman. Her literary reputation rests mainly on her carefully crafted pieces of poetry, particularly the verse that she composed in the months leading up to her death. Plath has been considered a deeply honest writer, whose ceaseless self-scrutiny has given an unique point of view to psychological disorder and to the theme of the feminist-martyr in a patriarchal society. In this discourse, Ted Hughes has become the villain, whom Robin Morgan accused in 1972 in a poem of killing Plath. "I accuse / Ted Hughes," she wrote in 'The Arraignment'. However, Janet Malcolm has defended Hughes in her book The Silent Woman (1994), in which she sees Plath's literary spouse a Prometheus figure who has to "watch his young self being picked over by biographers, scholars, critics, article writers and newspaper journalists."see also: i need to feel alone amongst the weeds
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