Anne Sexton : A Biography - Hardcover

Middlebrook, Diane Wood

4.17

3,981 ratings by Goodreads

9781853814068: Anne Sexton : A Biography

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1853814067 ISBN 13: 9781853814068

Publisher: Virago Press, 1991

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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.

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From the Back Cover:

A wonderful book, just, balanced, insightful, complex in its sympathies and in its judgment of Sexton both as a person and as a writer... a deeply moving account."-- The New York Times Book Review

"Judicious and canny. [Middlebrook] appreciates both Sexton's gifts as a poet and her attractive side as a human being...but looks at her destructive weaknesses with a steady eye." -- Time

"Sympathetic but resolutely unsentimental ... intelligent, sensitive, at times harrowing." -- Joyce Carol Oates, Washington Post Book World

About the Author:

Dianne Wood Middlebrook is the author of several volumes of poetry and critism as well as the prizewinning bestseller Anne Sexton: A biography. The recipient of many fellowships and awards, she is a professor of English at Stanford University, where she has also served as the director of the center for research on women. She currently lives in San Francisco.

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