As the child of an immigrant father and first-generation American mother, Plath was raised to believe that academic success and a complete “embrace of mainstream American values” were essential to survival in the xenophobic midcentury.Ĭaught between her desire to live an unconventional, artistic life and adhere to her immigrant family’s ideas about what it takes to make it in America, Plath cheerfully worked herself to great exhaustion, releasing her suppressed negative emotions in her writing. The biographer helpfully repositions Plath’s ambition and work ethic within her family’s socioeconomic context. She draws on the well-known letters and texts ( Ariel, The Bell Jar) as well as a wealth of unpublished materials, including high school essays, early drafts, interviews with Plath friends conducted in the 1970s, and newly discovered letters Plath wrote to her psychiatrist from 1960-63.Ĭlark deftly draws out some of the less-recognized aspects of Plath’s life. Working against entrenched interpretation is no easy task, and Clark has done an impressive amount of research to buttress her view of the poet. “This book will trace Plath’s literary and intellectual development rather than her undoing.” “Previous biographies have focused on the trajectory of Plath’s suicide, as if her every act, from childhood on, was predetermined to bring her closer to a fate she deserved for flying too close to the sun,” writes Clark. Early on Clark establishes that her biography will avoid the sensationalism and cultural politics that have driven so many other works on Plath. In Clark’s attentive hands, Plath’s life is laid out in its full complexity. But my skepticism was misplaced: Clark’s Red Comet is absolutely necessary. The mid-century poet has been the subject of at least 12 prior biographies and numerous critical works as well as feature film starring Gwenyth Paltrow. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark (Knopf)īefore reading Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath I wondered if readers need yet another Sylvia Plath biography.

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