Anne Sexton
1928 - 1974
Anne Gray Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts. Her father, a lawyer and woolen manufacturer, was an alcoholic. Her mother suffered from unfilled literary aspirations. Anne was not comfortable with school, but she attended a finishing school and was briefly a fashion model.
She eloped at nineteen with Alfred Sexton. Upon the birth of their first daughter, Linda, she suffered postpartum depression and was hospitalized. The birth of Joyce, their second daughter, in 1955 led to increased depression. Her therapist encouraged her to write, and Sexton’s first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960. Extramarital affairs did not prevent her further attempts at suicide, but she was strengthened by participation in a Boston University seminar with Robert Lowell and students Sylvia Plath, George Starbuck, and an increasingly close friend, Maxine Kumin, with whom she later authored four children’s books.
In 1959 both of Sexton’s parents died. All My Pretty Ones (1962) expresses her grief, guilt and loss. Live or Die was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1966. Love Poems was issued in 1968, and she was the Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard. Her last writings expressed her strange hunger for death: The Death Notebooks and The Awful Rowing Toward God.
Anne Sexton killed herself with carbon monoxide in her garage at age 46.
From- http://harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/sexton.php
