Author Sylvia Plath's association with death and madness stemmed from her confessional poetry, her novel The Bell Jar, and the facts of her life, but most of all from the cult of readers—many of them teenage girls—that formed after her suicide. Plath's stormy marriage to poet Ted Hughes was a matter for the literary tabloids, and her work was taken up by scholars as evidence of a troubled soul oppressed by sexist times. Her poems—most particularly those published posthumously in Ariel —are an enduring proof of her very real talent.

Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. Her father, a college professor and expert on bees, died when she was eight. She was a good student, and published her first short story in the magazine Seventeen when she was just a teenager.

In 1950, Plath entered Smith College on a scholarship...