Sylvia Plath was an American author whose work includes the novel The Bell Jar and Ariel.

Nicholas Hughes, the son of Plath and poet Ted Hughes, committed suicide at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska. Hughes, 47, was not married, had no children and worked as a marine biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.CNN.com: Tragic poet Sylvia Plath's son kills himself (March 23, 2009)

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but was raised in Wellesley after her father died when she was eight years of age. At a very young age Plath demonstrated a propensity for words, even having a poem of hers published in the Boston Herald at the age of nine. Throughout school Sylvia was a model student and published the story “And Summer Will Not Come Again” in Seventeen magazine and the poem “Bitter Strawberries” in the Christian Science Monitor during her senior year in High School. As a result Plath earned a scholarship to Smith College where she majored in English literature and composition.

During the summer of her third year in college, Plath won a scholarship and a position as "guest editor" at Mademoiselle magazine. The experience had a lasting effect on Sylvia, becoming the inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar and led to a nervous breakdown. Later that summer, Sylvia made her first medically documented suicide attempt by crawling under her house and taking an overdose of sleeping pills. After this attempt she was briefly committed to a mental institution and received electroconvulsive therapy. Plath seemingly recovered and graduated with honors in 1955.

Plath later obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University where she met and married, the English poet Ted Hughes. The couple moved back to the United States in 1957, where they lived until Sylvia became pregnant with their first child. Back in England Plath successfully published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus in 1962. Antagonized by her husband’s adulteries and rocked mentally by the birth of her second child, Plath filed for divorce and moved with the children to London. In February 1963, shortly after the publication and success of her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Plath committed suicide.

• 1962: The Colossus and Other Poems
• 1963: The Bell Jar
• 1965: Ariel