10 Year Anniversary of Sylvia Plath (Great Writers)

This is not naturally something I would expect anyone to know, remember, or commemorate, but ten years ago this month my biography of Sylvia Plath (Chelsea House Publishers, Great Writers series) was published. (Amazon's page claims that it was published in April, but copies were not available until June. It also has a capsule review, still, for the wrong book. #OhWell.) To those who have read it: Thank you! To those who have not, it is available in both hardback and Kindle editions, and also available in many libraries around the world, and through some used book shops.

Sylvia Plath formed one sixth of an original series that also includes biographies of Barbara Kingsolver by Linda Wagner-Martin, Kurt Vonnegut by John Tomedi, J.R.R. Tolkien by Neil Heims, Charles Bukowski by Michael Gray Baughan, and Jack Kerouac by Jenn McKee. The series expanded the following year to include books on five gay and lesbian writers: Adrienne Rich by Amy Sickels, Allen Ginsberg by Neil Heims, James Baldwin by Randall Kenan and Amy Sickels, Oscar Wilde by Jeff Nunokawa and Amy Sickels, Walt Whitman by Arnie Kantrowitz, and Sappho by Jane McIntosh Snyder and Camille-Yvette Welsch. I have not yet read the other books in the series, but as I think about this, maybe I should. Has anyone out there read any of the others?

At the time it was published, it was the first new biography of Plath to appear since 1991, when Paul Alexander's Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath and Ronald Hayman's The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath were published. The book was written for a specific audience in mind: junior high and high school aged children and college students, to serve as an introductory text that might inspire its readers to both become interested in Plath's writings and life, and lead them to potentially investigate full-length biographies as well as works of criticism. Notwithstanding, it presented snippets of new information never previously known or mentioned in other biographies.

One of the aims of my book was to present a bias-free version of Plath's life for that younger audience. I think I largely succeeded in doing this, keeping it straightforward, hopefully easy to read, interesting and informative. I had intended the book to include illustrative photographs and sidebars, written to the guidelines stipulated in the contract. Neither of these added-value materials were used, sadly. I posted the unused sidebars on this blog in 2007, and hope that they can be read in conjunction with the text, to highlight certain things in the work, or on occasion to at least discuss topics intentionally not expounded upon in the text.

Overall I am still thrilled to have had the opportunity to write the book. It gave me a chance to share some of the information I had acquired on Plath to that point. How I wish I could revise it with some of the things I have learned since! And, too, how I wish I had more than 10 weeks in which to write it!

All links accessed 16 May 2014.

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...

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