Anne Sexton, née Anne Gray Harvey, was born in 1928 in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. She was the third-born of three girls. She was raised in nearby Weston and attended boarding school in the area, then spent a year at the Garland School, a women’s liberal arts college. She married Alfred Muller Sexton II in 1948 and modeling for a time while he served in Korea. Her two daughters, Linda and Joyce, were born in 1953 and 1955. She suffered from post-partum depression after Linda’s birth, and, following a severe manic episode, she began therapy with Dr. Martin Orne. Orne assigned her journal entries to process her mental health and therapy sessions. Finding in them an unusual literary talent, he suggested that she write poetry.
Although Sexton was initially hesitant to attend poetry workshops, once she began, she almost immediately found success as a writer. She was published by acclaimed literary magazines, including The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. Upon reading W. D. Snodgrass’s book Heart’s Needle, she discovered that his original, deeply personal writing style felt natural to her, and he became a mentor to her as she wrote similarly raw and intimate work. She joined Boston writing groups, including a Boston University poetry seminar taught by Robert Lowell that connected her with fellow confessional poets Lowell and Sylvia Plath, and befriended other major figures in American poetry, such as Maxine Kumin.
Sexton’s first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960 and explored her struggles with bipolar disorder. She published six more poetry collections before her death, including Live or Die (1966), The Book of Folly (1972), and The Death Notebooks (1974). Three more collections of her work were published posthumously. She also wrote several children’s books with Kumin and a play, Mercy Street. She performed in a jazz group, Her Kind.
Although Sexton racked up significant accolades for her writing during her short life, both her public and personal life were complex and often fraught. She faced criticism from prominent members of the cultural establishment, who felt that it was unfeminine and offensive to cover topics like suicidal ideation, masturbation, and addiction in her writing, and considered her apparently autobiographical work to be less than literary. Her mental health grew increasingly fragile, and she developed alcoholism and was institutionalized several times. Her home life was also troubling: her daughter Linda revealed after Sexton’s death that she had been sexually abusive of Linda and violent toward both her daughters.
Sexton died by suicide in 1974. Her many laurels include a Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die, a Royal Society of Literature fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Levinson Prize, the Frost Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and multiple honorary degrees. She is remembered today as one of the great forces of the confessional school, who helped to democratize poetry by legitimizing writing about painful and taboo topics by women and people of all genders.
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More Anne Sexton
Video: Sexton reads "Her Kind" and other poems in outtakes for USA: Poetry
Text: Read poetry by Sexton at the Poetry Foundation
Text: Erica Jong eulogizes Sexton for the New York Times
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Photo by Elsa Dorfman.