Sylvia Plath meticulously kept track of her publication endeavors. She made submissions lists from around the time she a junior in High School (1948-1949) to within days of her death in February 1963. She was assuredly the consummate professional. If a work was published she usually kept a copy of its appearance for herself, though there are some instances were poems or works in prose were not retained by her (or her estate)--- see this post on her "Class Poem", for example . However, her poetry was reprinted periodically in publications (newspapers mostly) about which she likely never knew. That is the subject of this blog post. Stephen Tabor's seminal Analytical Bibliography did not have the advantage of so much text-searchable digital content. But even if it had, some of these publications that will be mentioned today may not have appeared in the pages of his cherished book. His book tended not to include second publications of Plath's works. Which is absolutely f...

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 Stud...

On the first of this year, I was going through some paperwork and computer files for a book-in-progress (more about this in my Year in Review post in December), and I stumbled upon two poems Sylvia Plath published towards the end of her sophomore year at Smith College.  I tweeted about it , drafted this blog post, and then forgot all about posting it because other things made it up on the blog first.  I knew as far back as 2015 that  Plath had published something in the Commencement, 1952, issue of Campus Cat , but the humor magazine lists contributors but anonymizes the work therein by not including by-lines. Campus Cat  does not appear in Plath's hand on extant typescripts of the poems that I have seen...but it is certain I have not seen all of Plath's typescripts...so this might not be news to some... On page 1 of the issue, Plath's poem "Virus TV: (We Don't Have a Set Either)" appears under the title "T.V. Or Not T.V.", and there is a prose parag...

It seems impossible not to search for Sylvia Plath. Whatever that means either to you or to me. In the last year I have located a few more articles on her first suicide attempt, which was made on 24 August 1953, in Wellesley, Massachusetts.  The new articles were found in the Pensacola News Journal (Pensacola, Florida), The State (Columbia, South Carolina), the Tulsa Daily World (Tulsa, Oklahoma), and an additional article that ran in the Meriden Journal (Meriden, Connecticut).  The article in the Pensacola News Journal was found rather by accident as Plath's name is not mentioned in the article. But as you can see it is clearly about this bright young Smith College student. An image of each of these articles, as well as transcriptions, have been added to the b ibliography of articles on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt on my website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is .  The current count of articles that appeared over these few days in August, 1953, is 31...

Sylvia Plath graduated from the Alice L. Phillips Junior High School in Wellesley in June 1947. She was a regular contributor to the school's magazine The Phillipian , appearing in eleven issues during her years there: 7th Grade November 1944 April 1945 June 1945 8th Grade November 1945 February 1946 April 1946 June 1946 9th Grade November 1946 February 1947 April 1947 June 1947 You can see a listing of all of her publications over on A celebration, this is , my website for Plath. Most of the poems and pieces I have copies of, as I have worked in archives with the original magazines for most of them (or clippings that Plath herself retained). However, the June 1947 issue was partly elusive. Her poem "May", appearing on page 26, was clipped by Plath and now resides in an archive. But her "Class Poem", which was published on page 11 of the same issue, does not seem to exist and I have been looking for it for about twenty years. I have photocopies of, I believe, a...

As I routinely do, I continue to search for articles on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt in August 1953. Earlier in the year, I found a number of new articles and these are all now on the bibliography page of Articles on her disappearance and recovery . Articles were found in the following newspapers: The Tampa Tribune (Tampa, Florida) The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah) Wilkes-Barre Record (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) The Birmingham News (Birmingham, Alabama) The Miami Herald (Miami, Florida) Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) Public Opinion (Chambersburg, Pennsylvania) The Millville Daily Republican (Millville, New Jersey) The York Dispatch (York, Pennsylvania) Daily News (New York, New York) The Tribune (Scranton, Pennsylvania) Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wisconsin) The Morning News (Wilmington, Delaware) Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) St Josephs News Press Gazette (St. Joseph, Missouri) Pittsburgh Sun Tele...

Yes is the answer. I am still searching for Sylvia Plath. This year, so far, has felt slow for finding new articles on Plath's August 1953 disappearance and suicide attempt but there is one new one to report. It is "Missing Girl Found Asleep in Home" from page 1 of the Buffalo Evening News on 26 August 1953. It joins another Buffalonian article previously found from the 27th in the Buffalo Courier Express . The article is on the First Suicide Attempt page of A celebration, this is , as well as a transcription of the text which reads much the same as all the others on this aspect of Plath's disappearance. All links accessed 4 August 2019.

Fun Fact: Did you know that Sylvia Plath uses the word "perched" seven times in  The Bell Jar? Right... There is some new work to promote that has come out in the last week by and on Sylvia Plath. The Hudson Review has published, in full, the text of Sylvia Plath's short story "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom" in their Spring issue. It was the intention all along that the story appear in the Hudson before the decision was made by the Estate of Sylvia Plath and Faber to publish it in book form. I was asked by the Hudson to cheer lead their effort, which I was happy to do, to have the story appear first in their pages. I guess I did too good of a job? There is an essay by Karen V. Kukil on the story, too. Next, Marsha Bryant has recently published "Queen bees: Edith Sitwell, Sylvia Plath & cross-Atlantic affiliations" in Feminist Modernist Studies . The abstract reads, Drawing on the convergence of Edith Sitwell and Sylvia Pla...

One cannot deny that reading Sylvia Plath's works fills each of us with immense pleasure. It is also a thought-provoking activity which often leads to writing about Plath. Many of us have done it and will continue to do it. Articles about Plath show how she was viewed at the time of their publication as well as reflect the education and (potential) biases of the writer. They are a rich history of perspectives and form the foundation upon which our current interpretation(s) and understanding(s) of Plath's works and life are built. And they potentially forecast how Plath scholarship will develop in the future, too. Or, at least, in some instances, show us how far we have come. I have been at work for about fifteen years or so on an updated bibliography of articles about Sylvia Plath that is built from Stephen Tabor's Sylvia Plath: An Analytical Bibliography (1987). Additional bibliographies by Meyering (1990), Lane and Stevens (1978), and Northouse and Walsh (1974) are oth...

This blog post was modified, to add links, on 12 December 2018.--pks The immediacy of Twitter has often inadvertently led to the absence of some information on Sylvia Plath appearing on this blog. For example, the reviews of the  Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2  have been tweeted and recorded on my bibliography of reviews of Plath's work on my website , but not here. So I thought I might do a little blog post to post the reviews and include links to however many that I can which appear online. Linking to reviews is presently a feature on my website that I do not take the time to do. Perhaps I should? Probably not, I still fear the breaking of links as it what so often happened earlier in this century. Here are the reviews, including some pieces which are more coverage of the book, of  Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2  that have been published to date (or will be shortly--Rollyson and Schoerke). Some are behind paywalls and one just is not online. Some wer...

One cannot read and work with Sylvia Plath's letters, diaries, scrapbooks, or pocket calendars without noticing a trend. She loved movies, plays, and late in her life, the opera. She took in a film whenever and wherever she could in Wellesley, Boston, the Cape, Northampton, Cambridge (US and UK), London, and New York, to name several cities she cultivated in her quest for culture. When I was working on the Letters of Sylvia Plath , I included the cinema or theater name for the films, plays, etc. that she attended. I did this for a couple of reasons, one of which was this kind of information interested me and so I felt compelled to record it in case there are other like minded Plath readers out there. I wrote a little about this recently on Gail Crowther's website in a piece called " The Archival Stretch ". After a while of repeatedly seeing reference to these events, I decided to compile a list of all the films, plays, and what not that Plath took in using all th...

With August on us I continue the search for Sylvia Plath. Recently I found just one new article on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt which brings our total now to 264 articles that appeared. And of course we know the number is far greater and perhaps in time more will be found. They all say just about the same thing, but it never ceases to astonish me how far and wide the story spread. The new article was in the Muscatine Journal and News Tribune out of Muscatine, Iowa. It ran on 26 August 1953, page 8, under the title "College Girl Missing—". The standard photograph ran with the article. The article image and transcription have been added to the bibliography on A celebration, this is . All links accessed 16 August 2018.

On 24 August 2017, I put out a call for help in searching for articles on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt. Tim Clair of Plath Project came to the rescue! Searching a combination of web resources, he identified an article from Mount Pleasant, Iowa's newspaper the Mount Pleasant News . Tim shared with me his searches and queries and as a result, I signed up for newspapers.com and located a cache of additional newspaper articles from across the country. I also popped up to Harvard and found two additional newspaper articles from the Evening Star out of Washington, D.C., from one of their digital resources. So in all, more than forty new articles on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt have been identified. This is incredible and please please join me in thanking Tim very sincerely for heeding the call. Below is a bibliography of those articles in order by date, and then by newspaper names. August 25 "Top Student Missing." Newport Daily News . August...

Well, things have been kind of crazy for the last six weeks or so. With the publication of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956  in the UK and the US, and then participating in one event , following other events, looking for reviews, etc. it is not hard to imagine why! But I wanted to give a general update at this point in time on a few things. First up, those reviews: I have started to list review of the Letters on my website for Sylvia Plath,  A celebration, this is . in the " Reviews of works by Sylvia Plath " page. This will be updated as I learn of reviews. The good people at Faber and HarperCollins have sent several to me which is wonderful. If you know of any not list please do let me know about it. I do not read them all but it will be helpful I think to have them tracked. In August and September I did three posts on "The Education of Sylvia Plath", looking at her courses and writings for each academic year: 1950-1951 , 1951-1952 , and 195...

Happy Sylvia Plath Info Blog New Year! In the autumn of 2016, I spent a lot of time during my lunch hour at work going to the Boston Public Library to re-examine all the microfilmed newspapers that they hold re-searching for articles on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt. I did this because at the same time I was transcribing all the articles, for you, I felt it was important to re-check everything. Also, I made new scans of some of the articles that originally were of lesser quality because of the great advances made in microfilm readers since circa 2005-2012. In the end, I found a number of articles that I missed in my previous researches. It is important to admit that I missed them. Some of the articles were from other editions of a particular newspaper issue and I can only think that when I first started looking for these articles in the first place that I did not place as much bibliographic emphasis/attention on these. And some of them I found because they were not at fi...

The Smith Alumnae Quarterly recently launched a fully searchable and downloadable archive of their amazing publications ( story ). Sylvia Plath featured in a dozen or so from the time she entered Smith through into the 1970s. I have gone through the issues from 1950 through the current Winter 2016 issue and found the following instances either where Plath authored a piece or she was mentioned. I love that the availability of the online archive takes one to the present issue. Fantastic. I was going to take the rest of the year off blogging to give you a break from me, but this resource is too cool not to mention and fits in with a theme highlighted in the Year in Review 2016 of digitization. February 1951. Sylvia Plath's Letter excerpt (unattributed) to Olive Higgins Prouty Fall 1953. Sylvia Plath's "'Smith Review' Revived" Fall 1954. Sylvia Plath's "The Neilson Professor" Summer 1955. Mentioned: Scholarship to study at Cambridge Spring...

As you know, or should know, I post on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt every year on 24 August. Or, I try to. In the past, such blog posts have detailed newly found articles from cities and towns across the United States. This got me thinking: It is fine and dandy to write about them, but how about sharing visuals with you all? Well, I have seen to that. Over on my website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is , visitors can now see and download PDFs or JPGs of all the articles that I have found on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt in August 1953. It is my eternal hope that by seeing the list of articles and now the articles themselves, that the sensation this story was, and the concern and chaos and confusion, can be truly grasped. So, please head over to the " Bibliography of Newspaper Articles on Sylvia Plath's First Suicide Attempt in August 1953 " and click around and save some files. Most of the articles come from microfilm either held by ...

The Campus Cat , Commencement 1952 In the spring of 1952, Sylvia Plath was a very active young woman at Smith College. Completing her sophomore year, Plath was doing well academically, but also socially and in terms of extracurricular activities. She was involved with Press Board, covering campus events as well as sending out news stories to local papers. But she was also involved with a small publication called the The Campus Cat . The Campus Cat was a publication created by Smith students in 1918. Its contents provided information to the campus about going-ons, events, activities, and poked fun at the rituals, trials, and stresses of academia and life on the Smith campus. Contributions to the periodical were anonymous, though the contributors were listed in the front of the magazine. In her 1952 calendar, held by the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington, Plath has three reminders on 3, 7, and 14 May 1952. On the 3rd she worked on writing her piece; on the 7th...

I was surprised recently to discover that I have been looking for the press releases that Sylvia Plath wrote for Smith College's Press Board for more than six years. This was determined judging from the file creation dates for some PDF's that I have. Granted, this project was done off and on as time and as information from my various researches permitted, but it is a long time and I think this post will represent closure on the project (for now). One of Sylvia Plath's Press Board and course notepads, held by the Lilly Library. In March 2015 I spent four days at the Lilly Library . Held there are a couple of spiral bound notebooks that Plath used for recording impressions and quotes and interview notes that she then used to write her releases. This was really valuable information because it also complemented her wall calendars where she noted down class assignments, dates, extracurricular activities, vacations, films and plays, and other details of her life at Smit...