(1932 – 1963) American meteor: Plath won a Mademoiselle short-fiction prize, graduated from Smith, studied at Cambridge, married late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and published vital, smart, musical poems (The Colossus) and an autobiographical novel about a brilliant, unstable young female writer, The Bell Jar (1971). American martyr: separated (with two children), furiously productive (two to three poems a day at the end), fiercely despondent, Plath committed suicide at thirty-one. Hughes edited the angry posthumous Ariel (1965) and critics cite conflict of interest. In America, her tragedy supersedes her work; readers will eventually acknowledge that the poems suffice.