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Anne Sexton: A Biography cover

Anne Sexton: A Biography

Diane Wood Middlebrook

0

awards won

8

score

#793 of 3,809 books · #326 in Biography & Memoir

Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1991) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (1991).

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 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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Publisher
Boston : Houghton Mifflin
Topics
Poetry and confessional writingMental illness and suicideFamily trauma and abuse

Other awarded books from Diane Wood Middlebrook

Diane Wood Middlebrook has no other awarded or shortlisted books yet.

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