Sylvia Plath

Published one novel and one collection in her lifetime, and the reputation rests largely on poems assembled after her death.

The Bell Jar follows a talented young woman through a summer internship in New York and into a psychiatric ward, and it is funnier than its reputation allows, right up to the point where it is not. She published it under a pseudonym a month before she died.

Ariel was written in the last months, often before dawn, and Ted Hughes edited and reordered it, which scholars have argued about ever since. Plath died in London in February 1963, at thirty. She was the first person awarded a posthumous Pulitzer for poetry.

The mythology around the death has repeatedly swallowed the work, which is worth resisting: the technical control in those late poems is the reason anyone remembers the life at all.