New Articles on Sylvia Plath's First Suicide Attempt

Normally this kind of update appears in August, but for various reasons it is appearing today. Since I wrote last year, a number of new articles on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt have been digitized. Each was transcribed and was added to the full bibliography of articles on Plath's first suicide attempt on my website, A celebration, this is.

The ten new articles appear below.

"Missing Student." Birmingham Post-Herald. 26 August 1953: 23.

"Missing Poetess Hunted 3 Days Found in Cellar." Birmingham Post-Herald. 27 August 1953: 11.

"Student Disappears." The Macon News. 26 August 1953: 1.

"Student Found." The Macon News. 27 August 1963: 25.

"100 Hunt Smith Girl in Mass. Woods." The Lewiston Daily Sun. 26 August 1953: 1.

"Find Smith Girl Under House Porch." The Lewiston Daily Sun. 27 August 1953: 1.

"Missing Mass. Girl is Found." The Lewiston Evening Journal. 26 August 1953: 2.

"Brilliant Student Found in Drug Coma." The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.), 27 August 1953: 16.

"Missing." The Lima News. 27 August 1953: 6.

"Missing Writer Found Sleeping." Springfield (Missouri) Daily News, 27 August 1953: 9.

This brings the the total presently to 321.

I think this search for Sylvia Plath shows that her disappearance reached far and wide due to the news wire system. When my own search for articles began in the early 2000s I based it off of the six or seven articles listed in Stephen Tabor's Sylvia Plath: An Analytical Bibliography. I can no longer remember why I started looking for more and what possessed me to spend hours of time on lunch breaks looking nauseatingly at microfilm at the Boston Public Library and Harvard and even on a vacation one miserable afternoon in Cleveland. But, I am glad I did as it gives a sense of urgency to the Plath family's state of mind during the 48 hours Plath was "missing", and even illustrates how news was spread 69 years ago. Sylvia Plath's disappearance clearly "went viral."

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All links accessed 29 May 2022.

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