The Making of Sylvia Plath
Since her death, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing, however, interest in Plath has also been fueled in part by the tragic nature of her death. As a result, a steady stream of biographies of Plath have appeared over the last fifty-five years that mainly focus on her death or contain projections of an array of points of view about the writer.
Until now, little sustained attention has been paid to the influences on Plath’s life and work. What movies did she watch? Which books did she read? How did media shape her worldview? In this meticulously researched biography, Carl Rollyson explores the intricate web of literature, cinema, spirituality, psychology, and popular culture that profoundly influenced Plath’s life and writing. At the heart of this biography is a compelling exploration of William Sheldon’s seminal work, Psychology and the Promethean Will, which Plath devoured in her quest for self-discovery and understanding. Through Plath’s intense study of this work, readers gain unprecedented access to Plath’s innermost thoughts, her therapeutic treatments, and the overarching worldview that fueled her creative genius.
Through Sheldon as well as Plath’s other influences, Rollyson offers a captivating survey of the symbiotic relationship between an artist and the world around her and offers readers new insights into the enigmatic mind of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.
The Making of Sylvia Plath builds upon and furthers the narrative that Carl Rollyson and other scholars have been working on for some time now—revising and repositioning the legacy of Sylvia Plath, which was so badly presented to the world in the decades after her death. Plath deserves the recognition of her genius, and it is important to understand and unravel ways in which women are often subjected to very different histories than men. This book offers new perspectives with a focus on underexplored areas of Plath’s life.
In The Making of Sylvia Plath, Carl Rollyson takes a deep dive into the intellectual and popular culture of Sylvia Plath’s time to see how she was shaped by cinema, books, and the fashionable ideas of her day. Once more, Rollyson helps to rehabilitate our bad ideas about Plath as a grim, deadly serious writer into a woman who loved movies, fashion, and the world around her, and who wanted to help shape that world, in turn. Rollyson’s breezy treatment of movies like Cynthia and his joyful approach to Plath’s interior development turn heady subject material into a page-turner, never sacrificing intellectual rigor. Every time we think we’ve learned everything we can about Sylvia Plath, Carl Rollyson changes our minds.
Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including Faulkner On and Off the Page: Essays in Biographical Criticism; Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volumes 1 & 2; William Faulkner Day by Day; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion. He also writes a column on biography twice a week for the New York Sun.
Author’s Note
Preface
Sources and Acknowledgments
Part One: The Early Years
Part Two: The Middle Years
Part Three: The Later Years
Postscript
Notes
Index
