Sylvia Plath

Talented from the very beginning of her life, Sylvia Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in the ""children’s section"" of the Boston Herald. She said of her childhood: ""I want to work at putting together the complex mosaic of my childhood; to practice capturing feelings and experiences from the nebulous seething of memory and yank them out into black-and-white on the typewriter."" Plath won several major prizes in writing and scholarship and her poems are considered today to be the most famous by an American female poet of the 20th Century, especially those in her 1965 collection Ariel. In 1981, Plath’s Collected Poems was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first American poet to win this prize after death. This volume in the Critical Insights series presents a variety of new essays on the unconventional American poet. This work will introduce Sylvia Plath to high school and college classrooms. Such introductions are usually conventional: biography, summary of works, and the author’s ""place"" in the history of American literature. This title provides such information. Yet, there is nothing ""conventional"" about Sylvia Plath. She is a unique, rare, rebellious and unexpected voice in American literature.Rounding out the volume are a chronology of Plath's life and a list of her principle publications as well as a bibliography for readers seeking to study this fascinating poet in greater depth. Each essay is 2,500 to 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of ""Works Cited,"" along with endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources:About This VolumeCritical Context: Original Introductory EssaysCritical Readings: Original In-Depth EssaysFurther ReadingsDetailed BibliographyDetailed Bio of the EditorGeneral Subject Index