The life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of legend. Educated at Smith, Plath had a conflicted relationship with her mother. She married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the sturm und drang of literary celebrity. Her poems were fought over, rejected--and ultimately embraced by readers everywhere. At age thirty she committed suicide. Ariel, a collection of poems she wrote at white-hot speed during her final months, became a modern classic. Her novel, The Bell Jar, has become a part of the literary canon. On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, Carl Rollyson gives us a new biography that shows her as a powerful figure who embraced both high and low culture, a writer who wanted nothing less than to become central to the mythology of modern consciousness. This is the first biography of Plath to use materials newly deposited in the Ted Hughes archive at the British Library--including 41 letters between Plath and Hughes--to create a fresh and starting look at this American icon.--From publisher description.