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Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
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About Red Comet: The Short Life And Blazing Art Of Sylvia
Product Description Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography • “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews--Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s. Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more. Clark's clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world ove Review *Winner of the Biographers' Club Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography**Finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Biography**Named a "Book of the Year" by The Times (London), The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, O, the Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Literary Hub, and The Times of India* “Mesmerizing . . . Comprehensive . . . Stuffed with heretofore untold anecdotes that illuminate or extend our understanding of Plath’s life . . . Clark is a felicitous writer and a discerning critic of Plath’s poetry . . . There is no denying the book’s intellectual power and, just as important, its sheer readability.” — Daphne Merkin, The New York Times "One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." — Glennon Doyle “A joyful affirmation for Plath fanatics and a legitimization of her legacy . . . It isn’t just modern hindsight that renders Red Comet uniquely complete: it’s old sources newly procured . . . Only in a biography this comprehensive can you get a sense of her intense trajectory and the transcendent achievement that is her poetry . . . Clark masterfully analyzes the poetry with intelligent incorporation of the biography.” —Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times “Aiming to shake the public perception of Sylvia Plath as ‘the Marilyn Monroe of the literati,’ Clark delivers a meticulous, unflinching and fresh view of the brilliant, troubled poet.” —People “Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath . . . Takes its time in desensationalizing the life and the art; this lets Clark place both firmly in the literary and politically engaged contexts that formed them and simultaneously demonstrate how Plath’s work, in return, gifted the writing life unimaginable new sinew.” —Ali Smith, The Guardian (“The Best Books of 2020”) “Insightful . . . Captures the frenetic pace of Plath’s life, from the speed with which she tackled her Smith courseload to her whirlwind courtship with and marriage to Hughes, to the dizzying dance of her correspondences . . . Red Comet is a critical examination of what it means to be a f
