Google Doodle Celebrates Sylvia Plath's Birthday

Yesterday was Sylvia Plath's birthday and as Newsweek reports (and as Google users may have noticed) the internet search engine honored her birthday with a drawing by artist Sophie Diao on its homepage. Newsweek reporter Hunter Moyler asks, "Who was she, and why is she worth remembering?" Picking up from there: 

Though she only lived to the age of 30, Sylvia Plath made an indelible mark on the literary world. She penned several books of poetry as well as the novel The Bell Jar, published in 1963. In the New York Times Book Review, fellow Pulitzer-winner Joyce Carol Oates described Plath as "one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English." She was awarded the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the first person to receive the accolade posthumously.

Much of Plath's work is reflective of the agony a person may experience as a result of mental health problems, as well as of how one's view of their own impending death can spur the most intense self-reflection. What she produced in her short yet illustrious career remains influential today.

Plath was born October 27, 1932, in Boston, and exhibited an early aptitude for the literary arts. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, she published her first poem at the age of 8, after which she proceeded to enter and win a slew of literary contests. Her work was sold to and published in The Christian Science Monitor and Seventeen magazine, and she was also a co-winner of a 1952 Mademoiselle magazine fiction contest. All this was while she was in high school, before she earned a scholarship to Smith College, a prestigious, all-women liberal arts college in her native Massachusetts.

Read on at Newsweek.