Bell Jar (Anniversary)

Description: The Bell Jar has become a classic of American literature and has sold more than two million copie in the U.S. An extraordinary work, it chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood--beautiful, brilliant, successful and slowly going under. This gift edition includes a forward by the original editor who reveals the untold story of the book's first publication.

Brief description: Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.

Review Quotes:

"An enchanting book. The author wears her scholarship with grace, and the amazing story she has to tell is recounted with humor and understanding." - Atlantic Monthly

"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." - USA Today

"Esther Greenwood's account of her years in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing. . . . [This] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures: it is literature." - New York Times

"The first-person narrative fixes us there, in the doctor's office, in the asylum, in the madness, with no reassuring vacations when we can keep company with the sane and listen to their lectures." - Washington Post Book World