Anne Sexton received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1966 for Live or Die.
She was a "confessional poet" in the tradition of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and W.D. Snodgrass. Her work reflected the emotional anguish that characterized her life and resulted in her suicide in 1974 at the age of 46.
Born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928, she married Alfred Muller Sexton II at the age of 19.
She was diagnosed with postpartum depression in 1954 after giving birth to a daughter in 1953 and suffered the first of several mental breakdowns.
She had shown an interest in writing poetry in high school and was encouraged to pursue it by her doctor at Westwood Lodge, a neuropsychiatric hospital where she sought help.
She met the poet Maxine Kumin , who became a close friend, at a poetry workshop in 1957 where she had enrolled at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Kumin expressed her belief, in her introduction to Sexton's Complete Poems, "that it was the writing of poetry that gave Sexton something to work towards and develop and thus enabled her to endure life for as long as she did."
Bibliography
Poetry:
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
All My Pretty Ones (1962)
Selected Poems (1964)
Live or Die (1966)
Love Poems (1969)
Transformations (1971)
The Book of Folly (1973)
The Death Notebooks (1974)
The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)
45 Mercy Street (1976)
Words for Dr. Y.: Uncollected Poems (1978)
The Complete Poems (1981)
Anne Sexton received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1966 for Live or Die.