Sylvia Plath, pseudonym Victoria Lucas, born October 27 1932 in Boston U.S.A.—died February 11, 1963 in London

American poet whose best-known works express a sense of alienation and self-destruction closely tied to her personal experiences and the situation of women in mid-20th-century America.

She published her first poem at eight years old.

While at college, Plath suffered from severe depression and attempted suicide but she also achieved considerable artistic and social success.

In 1956 she married the English poet Ted Hughes, they had two children. They separated in 1962, after Hughes’s affair with another woman.

She published The Bell Jar, her first novel, in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. the novel is autobiographical and deals with the mental breakdown and recovery of a young girl, thus paralleling Plath’s own experience in 1953.

During the last three years of her life, Plath wrote her most famous poems such as Daddy in which she explores her conflicted relationship with her father, Otto Plath, who had died when she was age eight. In 1963, after this burst of productivity, she took her own life.

Ariel, a collection of poems was published in 1965, and with the collected poems published in 1981 she received the Pulitzer Prize posthumously.

Many of Plath’s posthumous publications were edited by Hughes, who became the executor of her estate. However, controversy surrounded his editing practices when he revealed he had destroyed the last journals written before her suicide.