Anne Sexton : a biography / Diane Wood Middlebrook.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Middlebrook, Diane Wood, 1939-2007.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sexton, Anne, 1928-1974.

Sexton, Anne.

Poets, American--20th century--Biography.

Poets, American.

Genre:

Biographies.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copies 1 & 2)

Physical Description:

xxiii, 498 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

Edition:

First Vintage Books edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Vintage Books, 1992.

Summary:

Anne Sexton began writing poetry at the age of twenty-nine to keep from killing herself. She held on th language for dear life and somehow--in spite of alcoholism and the mental illness that ultimately led her to suicide--managed to create a body of work that won a Pulitzer Prize and that still sings to thousands of readers. This exemplary biography, which was nominated for the National Book Award, provoked controversy for its revelations of infidelity and incest and its use of tapes form Sexton's psychiatric sessions. It reconciles the many Anne Sextons: the 1950s housewife; the abused child who became an abusive mother; the seductress; the suicide who carried "kill-me pills' in her handbag the way other women carry lipstick; and the poet who transmuted confession into lasting art.

Contents:

Beginnings

Romance and marriage

Breaking down

"These are my people"

From Rats to Star

Mentors

Deaths, displacements, and substitutions

Getting a hearing

Poetry and the unconscious

Circle of women artists

The nana-hex

"Icarus catch"

"A seducing sort of woman"

Money and fame

Anne Sexton and her kind

Off-Broadway with Mercy Street

"A middle-aged witch"

The professor of poetry

Awful rowing

Posthumous performances.

Notes:

Originally published: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1991.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 463-468) and index.

ISBN:

0679741828

9780679741824

OCLC:

25747559

Online:

Publisher description Publisher description