This is a revealing new biography of the writer, Sylvia Plath, published in the 25th year following her death. The author draws on unpublished journals and letters only recently made available, as well as 200 interviews with people who knew her. The book is illustrated with previously unknown photographs of her childhood, marriage and literary friends. The work provides a crucial reappraisal of her life as a writer and as a woman, shedding new light on her important relationship with her mother, her academic career, her famous summer at Mademoiselle magazine, and on her first harrowing suicide attempt at the age of 20. The author traces her growth as a writer and she also tells the story of Sylvia Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes (Poet Laureate) and its painful collapse, her struggle to be wife, mother and writer - and provides new information about her last days. Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize and her novel, The Bell Jar still sells around 100,000 copies a year. The author has written 25 books, mostly works of criticism on American writers, including two collections of criticism on the work of Sylvia Plath.