Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and author, best known for the poetry collections The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965) and for The Bell Jar (1963), a semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman's breakdown. She is credited with advancing confessional poetry, and her Collected Poems won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, the fourth such award given posthumously. Plath died by suicide in London in 1963, a month after The Bell Jar appeared.