Biography Essay

Now famous for her ritual flirtations with death, Sylvia Plath has emerged as a significant fig- ure in contemporary American literature in the two and a half decades since her suicide on 11 February 1963. Her reputation as an accomplished and versatile author has developed as a response to the posthumous publication of the bulk of her work. A so-called modern confessional writer because of her open use of autobiographical material, Plath has been critically recognized for the intense focus of emotion in her art, especially in the crown jewel of her poetry collections Ariel (1965), written in the last six months of her life, and in her modern riteof- passage novel The Bell Jar (as Victoria Lucas, 1963). In her relatively brief but highly productive career, she created—and is popularly remembered for—a complex, nearly mystical, and personal body of poetry that has struck a note...