ANNE SEXTON

Anne Sexton (1928–1974)- Born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton Massachusetts, she eloped with Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II at age nineteen, even though she was engaged to someone else at the time. She joined several Boston writing groups in 1957, and came to know Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath. She published To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Selected Poems (1964) a Poetry Book Selection in England that year. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Live or Die (1966), the Frost Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference (1959), the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (1961), the Levinson Prize (1962) the American Academy of Arts and Letters Traveling Fellowship (1963), and the Shelley Memorial Prize (1967). She published The Book of Folly (1972), the ominously titled The Death Notebooks (1974), and The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), published posthumously.

After a years-long battle with mental illness, she committed suicide at age 46.

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