Anne Sexton was born on November 9, 1928, in Newton, Massachusetts. Her less than ideal adolescence, particularly Sexton’s parents’ influence on her feelings of isolation and neglect at home, sparked a long and horrible battle with depression and mental illnesses. Teachers often complained about her poor attitude and disruptive behavior in school, even suggesting her parents send the girl to a counselor, but her alcoholic father and bitter mother ignored the advice.

Sexton attended an all-girls boarding school and afterwards, for one year, took classes at a Massachusetts junior college. In 1948, at nineteen, she spontaneously e… [Sexton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the latter volume, as well as numerous other honors and grants] …loped with Alfred Muller Sexton II. She attended modeling school and worked as a fashion model for a short period while her husband, a member of the naval reserves, was shipped to Korea shortly after their marriage. Sexton’s depression worsened dramatically during her husband’s assignment overseas as she participated in affairs with other men and struggled to raise her daughter Linda. She continued regularly meeting with a psychiatrist who encouraged her to write poetry as a release for her emotions. A year after the birth of her second daughter, Joy, in 1955, Sexton was institutionalized for attempting suicide.

Two years later, while still under steady psychological therapy, Sexton enrolled in a poetry workshop where she met Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Mazine Kumin, who would become one of her closest friends. Encouraged by her new clique of literary acquaintances, Sexton published To Bedlam and Part Way Back in 1960 and received positive reviews, a small lift for the poet who had just lost both parents and whose marriage continued its slow and painful descent to eventual divorce. In the meantime, Sexton continued writing and publishing collections of poetry notwithstanding her escalating bouts of depression and hospitalization, including All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Live or Die (1966). Sexton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the latter volume, as well as numerous other honors and grants, such as a Guggenheim Fellowship and invitations to read her poetry or to teach at several colleges and universities. She also wrote a play, Mercy Street, produced off-Broadway in 1969.

Despite the fame she experienced, Sexton’s life never ceased spiraling out of control as a result of her depression. In 1973 she asked for a divorce from her husband, to whom she had been very unfaithful, and from that point lost connection with the outside world and drowned herself in loneliness and alcohol. No longer in contact with many of her friends, isolated from her family, and having published two final collections, The Death Notebooks (1974) and The Awful Rowing toward God (1974), Sexton committed suicide on October 4, 1974.