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. Here we confront a weird view of God which she dramatizes. This makes evident to us the indispensable human need for a logical vision of God.
Anne Sexton killed herself with carbon monoxide in her garage at age 46.
Her daughter Linda edited the posthumous poems 45 Mercy Street and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978). Collected Poems appeared in 1981. Her authorized biography is Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook (1991).
Sexton is the modern model of the confessional poet. She was inspired by the publication of Snodgrass' Heart's Needle. Her work encompasses issues specific to women such as menstruation and abortion, and more broadly masturbation and adultery, before such subjects were commonly addressed in poetic discourse.
The title for her eighth collection of poetry, The Awful Rowing Toward God, came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer the last rites, did tell her: "God is in your typewriter," which gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing for some more time.
