Anne Sexton began writing poetry at age twenty-eight as a form of psychotherapy during treatment for a clinical depression. By the time of her suicide at age forty-five she had become a major figure in postwar American poetry. Her work was intimate, confessional, comic, formally complex, psychologically acute, and disruptively female; and her popular public readings were spectacles of performance art. Admired by peers for her technical skill and compelling imagery, Sexton won most of the prizes available to American poets. She also gained, for a poet, an exceptionally wide audience of readers drawn to the contemporaneity of her work. Her poetry was distinctive in its straightforward treatment of mental illness and prosperous suburban life in the era of the Vietnam War and the sexual revolution in America.

Anne Gray Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts, the third of three daughters, to Mary Gray Staples of Auburn, Maine...