Full name: Anne Sexton: A Biography

Author: Diane Middlebrook Year: 1991 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Biographies, Poetry, Memoirs, History, Feminism Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780679741824

Anne Sexton began writing poetry at the age of twenty-nine to keep from killing herself. She held on to 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 from 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. Similar books: Byron by Benita Eisler Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford Robert Lowell by Ian Hamilton Philip Larkin by Andrew Motion Philip Larkin by James Booth Arthur Rimbaud by Enid Starkie Keats by Andrew Motion Walt Whitman by Justin Kaplan Bitter Fame by Anne Stevenson Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon A Tragic Honesty by Blake Bailey Simenon by Pierre Assouline The Life of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane Anais by Noel Riley Fitch The World Is What It Is by Patrick French Her Husband by Diane Middlebrook Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade Rough Magic by Paul Alexander City Poet by Brad Gooch Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon