Best Selling Books by Diane Wood Middlebrook

The jazz pianist Billy Tipton was born in Oklahoma City as Dorothy Tipton, but almost nobody knew the truth until the day he died. This jazz era biography evokes the rich, popular-music history of the Great Depression and reads like a detective story. 60 photos.

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.

Traces the six-year marriage between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, which ended with Plath''s suicide, profiling Hughes as a complicated and ambitious figure, and noting how many blamed him for Plath''s death.

Elle, c''est Sylvia Plath. une femme sujette à de vertigineuses dépressions, une épouse impeccable et néanmoins abusive, une mère parfaite et cependant ambivalente, une amante crédule et inquiète, en proie à une jalousie qui la conduira au désespoir absolu. Sylvia Plath se suicidera le 11 février 1963. Lui, c''est Ted Hughes, un homme fasciné par les sciences occultes et l''astrologie, un personnage complexe, tour à tour sombre et mondain, farouche et ambitieux. Marié à Sylvia Plath, le voilà déchiré entre son amour pour elle et son irrépressible besoin de liberté. Veuf avisé, il saura si bien gérer l''œuvre de sa femme qu''il fera d''elle un mythe. Sylvia Plath et Ted I Hughes comptent parmi les poètes les plus essentiels du XXe siècle. La biographie que Diane Middlebrook leur consacre plonge aux racines les plus profondes de la création littéraire unissant et divisant tout ensemble un couple hors du commun. C''est aussi l''histoire d''un amour qui fut fatal à Sylvia Plath. " Y a-t-il quelque chose le long de celte route, Y a-t-il quelque. réponse au bout ? " Ted Hughes " Pour qui est cette longue boîte blanche sous les arbres, qu''ont-ils donc accompli, pourquoi ai-je si froid ? " Sylvia Plath.

Ted Hughes married Sylvia Plath in 1956, and Plath committed suicide six and a half years later, for which many held Hughes accountable. This book presents a portrait of Hughes as a man, as a poet, and as a husband who was haunted for his entire life by the aftermath of his first marriage.