Sylvia Plath was one of the defining voices of the twentieth century, and one of the most appealing: few other poets have introduced as many new readers to poetry.
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime,
The Colossus (1960), and a novel,
The Bell Jar (1963);
Ariel was published posthumously in 1965. Her
Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.