Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life examines the way Plath made herself into a writer. Close analysis of Plath's reading and apprenticeship writing both in fiction and poetry sheds considerable light on Plath's work in the late 1960s. In this updated edition there will be discussion of the aftermath of Plath's death including the publication of her Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982. Biographies of Plath will be examined along with the publication of Hughes's Birthday Letters . A chronology maps out key events and publications both in Plath's lifetime and posthumously.

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Rockefeller awardee, and a resident at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and the Bunting Institute. She recently received the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service to American literature. Her 2013 A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present is her 53rd book. She has written two other books for this series, one on Ernest Hemingway and the other, in both 1999 and 2003, on Sylvia Plath. She writes widely on twentieth-century American literature, biography, women's writing and pedagogy. Her publications include A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (2000), William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism (2002), Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism (2009).

Chronology PART I The Writing Life Creating Lives Creating the Persona of the Self Recalling the Bell Jar Lifting the Bell Jar Plath's Hospital Writing Defining Health PART II The Journey Toward Ariel Plath's Poems about Women Plath's Triumphant Woman Poems Getting Rid of Daddy Sylvia Plath, The Poet and Her Writing Life The Usurpation of Sylvia Plath's Narrative: Hughes's Birthday Letters Notes Bibliography (selected), Primary and Secondary Index