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More Sylvia Plath Newspapers Articles from August 1953

Last year I found, through Newspaper Archive online, more articles about Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt; the search for her; and her discovery from the week of 24 August 1953. The Google Newspaper Archive project has long since stopped (those quitters!), which is a shame, but as we all well know, the search for Sylvia Plath continues...

The seven new newspaper articles that I have found brings our total known number of articles up to 183. The articles are:

"Object of Search." The Charleston Gazette. August 26, 1953: 1. [photograph of SP included]

"College Senior Missing." The Chester (Pa.) Times. August 26, 1953: 2. [photograph of SP included]

"Searchers Comb Woods for Smith College Girl." Corpus Christi Times. August 26, 1953: 16.

"Missing Student Found." The Daily News (Newport, R.I.). August 26, 1952: 8.

"Missing Smith Senior Found." The Times Record (Troy, N.Y.). August 27, 1953: 15.

"Second Wellesley Girl Student Listed Missing." The Daily News (Newport, R.I.). August 28, 1952: 2.

"Police Search for Missing Girl." Panama City News. August 29, 1953: 2.

There are more articles on Plath's disappearance available through Historic Newspapers; however, these (from Lowell, North Adams, and Fitchburg in Massachusetts) have already been accounted for in my essay and bibliography "'They Had to Call and Call': The Search for Sylvia Plath."

The last two articles in the list above refer to Plath's recent case, but are primarily about the disappearance of Penelope Protze, who also hailed from Wellesley, Mass. Protze at the time had recently left her job at the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead. The Yacht Club would have been familiar to Plath herself as two summers earlier, when she worked as a nanny for the Mayo family at 144 Beach Bluff Avenue in Swampscott, she and Marcia Brown visited Marblehead several times.

In Folder 29 of Plath's High School Scrapbook, which is held by the Lilly Library, there are photographs from the visit that Plath and Marcia Brown made to Children's Island, off the coast of Marblehead, Mass. The row to the island was two miles. The boat they rented is in one of the photographs, Marcia sits on it. Plath sketched Marcia at the piano (this was in the book Eye Rhymes - see in-text illustration 20, page 85). On the reverse side of the sketch is a blank form for a yacht club and this yacht club, the "Eastern and Pleon Yacht Club" is possibly where they rented said boat.

But I digress... And the search for Sylvia Plath continues...

All links accessed 18 June 2013.

You can see a bibliography of articles on Plath's first suicide attempt, and read PDF's of them, over at A celebration, this is.
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