Davison, Peter, The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.

Davison recounts the Boston poetry world in this memoir and describes the complex relationships and behavior of such celebrated poets as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Richard Wilbur, and W. S. Merwin.

Middlebrook, Diane Wood, Anne Sexton, Random House, 1991.    

Diane Middlebrook's 1991 acclaimed biography is based on hundreds of hours of taped conversations between Sexton and her therapist. Middlebrook shows Sexton as representative of a generation of "broken" poets who fought alcohol and drug addiction, and were infatuated with the idea of celebrity.

Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed., Critical Essays on Anne Sexton, G. K. Hall, 1989.

This study collects critical essays on Sexton's poetry from some of America's better known poetry critics such as Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Lacey, and Maxine Kumin. Almost all of the essays...