Sylvia Plath was ecstatic when Poetry accepted six of her recent poems in October 1956. She wrote to Ted Hughes, "POETRY has accepted SIX of my poems!!!!!!!!!! Like we dreamed of. Didn't I say the Fulbright would start the trigger?" ( Letters, Vol I , p 1292). It was the largest batch of her poems, to date, that were accepted; they appeared in the January 1957 issue. Another four poems followed in July 1957. Plath's dream of being in The New Yorker is well known; her first acceptance was in June 1958 when the magazine took "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" and "Nocturne" (published as "Night Walk" and then "Hardcastle Crags".) The magazine regularly accepted her work after she broke through. But they did not publish them all in a necessarily timely fashion. In her life, she saw nine of her poems in their "queer wobbly" font. After her death, they printed seven poems in their 3 August 1963 issue. Hughes published "G...

Sylvia Plath published two poems in the 6 November 1959 issue of TLS ( Times Literary Supplement ). They appeared just at the end of her time at Yaddo, and mere weeks before she sailed from New York back to England, for good. The TLS is a large format periodical printed on newspaper paper. Back in 1959 the issues were very big, certainly much bigger than it is today. This title is harder to come by, and indeed I believe its format also makes it more difficult to find in the original. But I was able to locate and acquire a copy recently with the help of some "tip" money a few kind people sent. See, I told you I would use it for Plath stuff! How I am going to store it is a question since it is a bigger item and the paper rather more fragile (acidic, brittle) than the kind used in magazines and journals. The two poems were "The Hermit at Outermost House" and "Two Views of a Cadaver Room". Plath submitted them sometime in 1959; just when is not known. Th...

Sylvia Plath wrote her most famous villanelle on 21 February 1953 about Myron "Mike" Lotz, of Yale, whom she met over the Thanksgiving holiday in November 1952. I suspect many of us have been in that position before about a love interest; and in fact maybe some of you feel this degree of beautifully painful longing waiting for the next exciting Sylvia Plath Info Blog post? Right… Anyway, Plath sent the poem off to The New Yorker and Harper's . A typescript copy of "Mad Girl’s Love Song" held by Lilly Library, probably sent by Plath to her mother in her letter dated the same day of composition, includes the following note typed at the top: "this one had the honor of being inspired by one myron lotz…" ( Letters of Sylvia Plath , 567). The poem has quite an interesting publication history. "Mad Girl's Love Song" was first published in the Smith Review (Spring 1953). It then appeared in the August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle . Made...

Please review October 2010’s Double Did you know ... as this post was alluded to at the end of it... Sylvia Plath amassed nearly 50 rejection slips from Seventeen magazine before her first published story, “And Summer Will Not Come Again”, was published in the August 1950 issue. But, did you know... this was not her first publication/appearance in Seventeen ? In the November 1949 issue (pictured here), Plath had a contribution to the lead article “When I’m a Parent” for which she was paid, I believe, $10. The article begins, “Sooner or later, every teen-ager says fervently: ‘When I’m a parent, I’ll do thus and so.’ If your mother or father show particular understanding, you make a mental note that you’ll treat your children as intelligently ... So we asked a number of you what your do’s and don’ts are...Here are the most illuminating and provocative. You said, ‘When I’m a parent...’” Plath’s response to this question is anonymous: her name does not appear next to her quote....

Sylvia Plath wrote "The Bed Book" in the spring of 1959. By June of that year she was actively marketing it; but in her lifetime it never came to be printed. In 1976, both Faber and Harper & Row brought out editions in the UK , illustrated by Quentin Blake and in the US , with illustrations by Emily Arnold McCully. While not included in any bibliography to date, excerpts of "The Bed Book" were printed in two American periodicals in 1976. In October 1976, Woman's Day published it. Though excerpted, there are some textual variations, mostly to do with stanza structure, capitalization, etc. This publications includes beautiful color illustrations by Sal Murdocca. It appears on pages 98-99. In December, Cricket , a magazine for children, printed 'Beds'. Like the above, it is excerpted and there are textual variations. This publication includes black and white illustrations by Emily McCully, on pages 32-38. The illustrations are the same as...

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams , like almost every other book by (or about) Sylvia Plath, has an interesting publishing history. It first appeared in 1977 in England, published by Faber in that shockingly orange dust wrapper . It was re-issued in paperback with additional material from the Sylvia Plath Materials held at Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1979*. On January 2, 1979, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams first appeared in the US, published by Harper & Row. Did you know that Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams was published in Sweden before it was published in the United States? Noveller och annan prosa was published by Trevi (Stockholm) in 1978. The translations were completed by Margareta Tegnemark. The Harper and Faber contents still do differ, with the Faber edition including two earlier stories Plath wrote in 1949, "The Green Rock" and "A Day in June". On the heels of the US publication was the Japanese translation Jo...

Sylvia Plath's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Collected Poems , is a remarkable assemblage of poetry. One wishes that it was a complete edition, printing all of her early poetry. But, did you know that the Index in the Harper paperback edition is missing one of Plath's best poems? Is the missing poem: A) Lady Lazarus B) Elm C) Wuthering Heights D) Ennui E) Daddy If you guessed choices A-D, you are incorrect. Choice E, 'Daddy', is the missing title from the Index. I need to check to see if the first line is also missing, as those are indexed as well. The poem is listed in the first Harper edition (1981), as well as in the Faber editions (hardback and paperback).

The Bell Jar is a very unusual book in that it had three different first editions by three publishers within a decade!Of course the first was the 1963 Heinemann edition by "Victoria Lucas". The second was in 1966 by Faber under Plath's name. And the third was the 1971 US edition by Harper & Row. Only the US edition(s) have the Afterword by Lois Ames. Similarly, the US edition of Ariel featured a foreword by Robert Lowell. The UK edition, which preceeded the US edition by several months, has a slightly different order, and no foreword. Careful readers of Plath's poetry, notably poems in The Colossus (1960 Heinemann/1962 Knopf), would have noticed the similarities between two of the poems in that collection and some scenes in The Bell Jar . Those two poems were "Suicide Off Egg Rock" and "Point Shirley".