Sylvia Plath  

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston Mass. A prodigious poet, Plath published her first poem at eight years old. Her first short story, And Summer Will Not Come Again, was written in her late teens, and published in Seventeen magazine.

Plath was plagued with depression for most of her life. She attended Smith College on a scholarship in 1950, but by 1953, was struck by a debilitating depressive episode and treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) shortly after returning from a guest editorship in New York at Mademoiselle magazine. In 1955, Plath graduated from Smith and was awarded the Glascock Prize for her poem Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea . 

After graduating from Smith College , Plath attended the University of Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship and continued to write poems which occasionally appeared in the student newspaper, Varsity. While studying at Cambridge , Plath met fellow poet, Ted Hughes. On June 16, 1956, Plath married Hughes at the age of 24. The couple spent the next three years living and working in the , where Plath taught at her alma matter, Smith College . While living in Boston Mass, Plath sat in on seminars with Robert Lowel, where she met and befriended poet Anne Sexton. 

Plath and Hughes returned to the , where they gave birth to daughter, Frieda Hughes on April 1, 1960. They lived in London prior to settling in Court Green, North Tawton . Soon after, Plath published her first collection of poems, The Colossus.  

Plath returned to London as a single mother now with two children in tow, Frieda and Nicholas. They lived in a flat once occupied by W. B. Yeats, which Plath considered a good omen. However, fortunate times were not ahead. On February 11, 1963, at age 30, Plath committed suicide by gassing herself in the kitchen. She was laid to rest in the churchyard at Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. 

Although it is unconfirmed whether Plath had commenced divorce proceedings prior to her death, Ted Hughes became the executor of her personal and literary estates. Hughes destroyed Plath's last journal, which she kept right up until her suicide. Hughes was criticized for his censorship of Plath’s diaries, as well as his affair and behavior in the marriage in general. The resentment which some felt towards him was evident in the fact that the name Hughes has been repeatedly chiseled off Plath’s tombstone, which has since been made tamper-resistant. 

Plath’s adult journals were first published in 1980 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath. After Smith College acquired all of Plath's remaining journals in 1982, Hughes had two of them sealed until the 50-year anniversary of Plath’s death, February 11, 2013. Shortly before his own death, however, Hughes unsealed the two journals, and passed down the project to their children. In 2000, Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.

In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, forThe Collected Poems.