Biographical sketch of Anne Sexton

Born on November 9, 1928, in Newton, Massachusetts, Anne Harvey attended Garland Junior College for a year before her marriage in August 1948 to Alfred M. Sexton II. They lived in New York and Massachusetts for some years and in Baltimore and San Francisco while Alfred Sexton served in the navy during the Korean War. She worked at various times as a fashion model and as a librarian.

Her poems, showing the influence of Robert Lowell, appeared in Harper's, the New Yorker, Partisan Review, and other periodicals, and her first book, "To Bedlam and Part Way Back", was published in 1960.

Her second book of poems, "All My Pretty Ones", appeared in 1962 and continued in uncompromising self- exploration.

"Live or Die", 1966, won a Pulitzer Prize and was followed by "Poems by Thomas Kinsella, Douglas Livingstone and Anne Sexton", 1968, "Love Poems", 1969, "Transformations", 1971, "The Book of Folly", 1972, "The Death Notebooks", 1974, "The Awful Rowing Toward God", 1975, and " Mercy Street"

She taught at Boston University in 1970-1971 and at Colgate University in 1971-1972.

She took her own life on October 4, 1974, in Weston, Massachusetts.