Sylvia Plath is widely recognized as one of the outstanding poets of the twentieth century. When her Collected Poems was published it won the Pulitzer Prize. Her only published novel, The Bell Jar, has become a modern classic. Because Plath drew so heavily on her own life in both her poetry and her fiction, the outlines of her life are familiar to readers. But, like most writers, Plath changed the facts of her life in her writing. In her determination to be both wife and mother, on the one hand, and teacher and writer on the other, Plath tried simultaneously to fulfill and to fight the conventions that bound women in the 1950s. In this biography, the first to draw on unpublished journals and letters recently made available, Linda Wagner-Martin examines the ironies and contradictions of Sylvia Plath's life, as well as her achievements.