SOURCE: An obituary in The New York Times, July 18, 1995, p. B12.

[In the obituary below, Gussow surveys Sarton's life and career.]

May Sarton, poet, novelist and the strongest of individualists, died on [July 16, 1995], at the York Hospital in York, Me., the town in which she had lived for many years. She was a stoical figure in American culture, writing about love, solitude and the search for self-knowledge. She was 83.

The cause of death was breast cancer, said Susan Sherman, a close friend and editor of her letters.

During a remarkably prolific career that stretched from early sonnets published in 1929 in Poetry magazine to Coming Into Eighty her latest collection of poems, in 1994, Ms. Sarton persistently followed her own path and was nurtured by an inner lyricism. She wrote more than 20 books of fiction and many works of nonfiction, including autobiographies and journals, a play and several screenplays. She...