Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath collections: Edward Butscher Collection of Papers

The Mortimer Rare Book Room in the William Allan Neilson Library at Smith College holds several different Sylvia Plath collections. The collection I will highlight here concerns Edward Butscher, Plath's first biographer. Butscher is almost single-handedly responsible for much of the information we know today on Plath. This does not necessarily mean he did a great job with the materials he collected, but all Plath biographers do owe him some credit. In fact, I have never successfully finished his biography; in some ways he may have done more harm than good.

The collection begins with Butscher's correspondence. He was able to get information from a wide variety of sources. Some notable people in Plath's life are Richard Norton, Cyrilly Abels, Wilbury Crockett, and Myron Lotz, amongst many, many others. The collection also holds Butscher's research notes and manuscripts for his 1976 biography, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness as well as his 1977 collection of essays, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work.

The collection also includes photocopies and printed versions of Plath's poetry and prose, fragments of Letters Home, as well as articles and essays about Plath. The collection includes 15 photographs of Plath, of her children, of places she lived, her grave, and the Wellesley High track team. The second to last series (Series III: Other Papers) contains some very interesting items, which I've pasted below:

  • Clippings about Sylvia Plath (5 items) 1949-50

  • Clippings about Sylvia Plath at Mademoiselle (1 item) 1953 Aug

  • Clippings about "Sylvia Plath" (play) (3 items) 1974 Jan

  • Clippings about Sylvia Plath's suicide attempt (9 items) 1953 Aug

  • Death certificate of Sylvia Plath: COPY 1963 Feb 11

  • Documents of Plath and Schober families (23 items) 1918-56
    - Birth certificate for Frank Richard Schober
    - Death certificates for Otto Plath, Theodore Plath, and Aurelia Greenwood Schober
    - Divorce of Otto and Lydia Plath
    - Marriage certificate for Frank and Louise Schober
    - Street listings for 892 Shirley St. and 92 Johnson Ave., Winthrop, Massachusetts
    - Tax reports for 892 Shirley St. and 92 Johnson Ave., Winthrop
    - Voter registrations for Aurelia S. Plath, Frank Schober, and Frank R. Schober
    - Winthrop Cemetery Plot Record

  • Obituaries of Sylvia Plath (3 items) 1963

  • School notes of Sylvia Plath for "The Novelist & the Unknown": photocopy n.d.

The finding aid to the Edward Butscher Collection of Papers on Sylvia Plath is online here. Use the sidebar on the left hand side of the screen to view the scope and contents notes, as well as series descriptions, and box and folder contents.

The Mortimer Rare Book Room web site is here.
The Neilson Library web site is here.

Popular posts from this blog

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last