The publishing history of Sylvia Plath's books has been one of time (duration) and improvement. It is an endlessly fascinating subject, how Sylvia Plath has been edited since she passed away. The period of 1963 to 1974 in particular could be a thesis. But this blog post is concerned with those books published starting in 1975.
Letters Home came out in 1975 in the US and the following year in the UK. This was followed by Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams in 1977 and 1979, Collected Poems in 1982, and The Journals of Sylvia Plath (abridged; and in the US only) in 1982. That is four major volumes in seven years.
The Journals were reissued worldwide in an unabridged format eighteen years after the original version in 2000, which was two years after the passing of Ted Hughes and about four or five years after he and his sister Olwyn turned over control of the Estate of Sylvia Plath to Frieda and the late Nicholas Hughes.
Ariel (first published in 1965 in the UK and with a different table of contents in the US in 1966) was "restored" nearly forty years later in 2004. Almost a decade later, Frieda Hughes oversaw a small but important publication of her mother's Drawings in 2013.
The Letters of Sylvia Plath were published 42 and 43 years after Letters Home and in two volumes in 2017 and 2018 to many more correspondents than in that first book. A new edition of Plath's Poems is in the works, scheduled to appear in Spring 2025 (44 years after Collected Poems).
In early February 2022, I signed a contract with Faber to edit a new book of Sylvia Plath's writings: The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath. Published today, its appearance comes 47 years after the first edition of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.
The manuscript for this has been in the works since about 2015 when I was in full-steam mode for the Letters project. I spent four days at the Lilly Library for the Letters book, and in the process acquired copies of a lot of Plath's prose and began transcribing them. Having the full-text of these pieces searchable and available at my fingertips was instrumental in aiding the writing of footnotes for Plath's Letters. In working on those volumes, I noticed just how many pieces she composed and discussed that were simply not accessible either to casual readers or to the scholars interested in Plath. A book idea was born.
The first draft was assembled sometime in 2018, but it was the pandemic that truly let me polish off the manuscript as I read it a couple of times each in 2020 and 2021.
The contract was signed electronically in early 2022 (which is how long this blog post has been festering as a draft), so the below was a staged reenactment for the purposes of illustrating this blog post. A lot has changed since then. For example, all those books behind me are now at Utica University (Blog Post 1; Blog Post 2; Finding Aid).
It is a dream of a book to be able to edit and bring out; and it is something I longed to do, really, since the first time I read Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams in the mid-1990s. I enjoyed the collection very much. Then, on my first visit to Smith College in May 1998, I read stories not included in Johnny Panic.
Neophyte Plath reader that I was at that time, it came as a surprise to me--I am not embarrassed to admit--that there were more works that Plath wrote than was printed in Johnny Panic. I yearned to find and read as much of Plath's prose as possible. I remember visits to the Library of Congress to read stories in their copies of Seventeen, Mademoiselle, etc. on microfilm and in bound volumes. In one of those research visits, I transcribed "Den of Lions." Maybe that is when this project actually started?
For a talk I gave in Seattle in January 2020, called "The Indefatigable Sylvia Plath", I analyzed all the prose I had assembled and compared it to what was published in Johnny Panic. The long and short of it is that up to that present moment, just 15% of Plath's prose is readily available and accessible to readers in book form (this includes 2019's Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom).
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath is a book that grew out of my love of Plath's prose and the work I did on The Letters of Sylvia Plath. I hope the nearly 217 works it contains does much to provide a better awareness of and understanding of Plath's efforts in the various genres represented. It is thrilling to have support from Frieda Hughes on this project and to be able to work with Faber in bringing out another edition of Plath's work. To aid in ushering into print all of Plath's correspondence and her prose is just simply an incredible feeling. I do all this work for you, the readers of this blog; the readers of Plath. My energy and effort are always, always for you. In case you missed it, please see this piece I wrote for Faber which was put online earlier this week.
At this time there is still no information available to me concerning an American edition though one can buy the Kindle edition. I will have a few extra copies for sale from a batch I am buying, so please stay tuned to Twitter for information on buying from me. The book will be available in Canada in November and in Australia in December. So if you want to read The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, your best options are to purchase from Faber directly any of the various book retailers.
One of the more interesting non-fiction pieces is Plath's "The Arts in America: 1954: Collage by a Collegian" completed by 28 February 1955 (pages 545-554 in the book) and written for the Vogue magazine's Prix de Paris competition. In it Plath writes about seeing the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, Sculpture, Watercolors and Drawings at the Whitney Museum and, as well as discussing art, talks about plays, movies, books, and records.
I went on a mini-deep dive for the artworks Plath mentions and have identified below the works I found easily. I hope it is helpful when you read these pages.
Robert Cook: Rodeo
Hugo Robus: Three Caryatids without a Portico
Joseph Cornell: Midnight Carousel
Lindsay Daen: Daedalus and Icarus
Lorrie Goulet: Bestia
Ruth Vodicka: Fulfillment
Sahl Swarz: Kafka
Jose de Rivera: Construction in Red and Black
Edward Hooper: Sea Watchers
Charmion von Wiegand: The Eight Categories of Fate
Russell Twiggs: Atomic Spring
Charles Burchfield: Pussy Willows in the Rain
John Ferren: Spring Fronds
Boris Margo: March 1954
Georgia O'Keefe: Winter Tree III
Ivan Albright: Whiskey Mountain
Peggy Bacon: Lingering Memories
John Wilde: Apotheosis of Marie-Henri Beyle
Richard Bové The Riders
Byron Goto: City, Night and Day
Siegfried Reinhardt: Winter
John Altoon: Archaic Visitors
Ynez Johnston: Statues at Midnight
Gregorio Prestpino: Pine Tree
Please see the footnote to "The Arts in America" for some other information about some of the people and works Plath mentions in the piece.
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