Sylvia Plath

Born in Boston in 1932, Plath graduated from Smith College and won a Fulbright to Cambridge, where she met and married poet Ted Hughes in 1956. After a brief return to the States - including a seminar with Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton that crystallized the confessional style - she moved back to England in 1959. Her first collection, The Colossus, came in 1960; by then she had two children and a marriage fraying under what unpublished letters to her therapist later revealed as physical and emotional abuse. She'd fought severe depression and brutal early electroconvulsive treatments for years. In 1963, The Bell Jar appeared under a pseudonym; one month later, separated from Hughes, she died by suicide in London at thirty. Ariel followed in 1965, then The Collected Poems in 1981 - winning her a posthumous Pulitzer, the fourth ever awarded to the dead.