Plath's best poetry was produced, tragically, as she pondered self-destruction---in her poems as well as her life---and she eventually committed suicide. She had an extraordinary impact on British as well as American poetry in the few years before her death, and affected many poets, particularly women, in the generation after. She is a confessional poet, influenced by the approach of Robert Lowell. Born in Boston, a graduate of Smith College, Plath attended Newnham College, Cambridge University, on a Fulbright Fellowship and married the British poet Ted Hughes. Of her first collection,The Colossus and Other Poems (1962), the Times Literary Supplement remarked, "Plath writes from phrase to… phrase as well as with an eye on the larger architecture of the poem; each line, each sentence is put together with a good deal of care for the springy rhythm, the arresting image and---most of all, perhaps---the unusual word." Plath's second book of poetry, Ariel, written in 1962 in a last fever of passionate creative activity, was published posthumously in 1965 and explores dimensions of women's anger and sexuality in groundbreaking new ways. Plath's struggles with women's issues, in the days before the second wave of American feminism, became legendary in the 1970s, when a new generation of women readers and writers turned to her life as well as her work to understand the contradictory pressures of ambitious and talented women in the 1950s. The Bell Jar---first published under a pseudonym in 1963 and later issued under Plath's own name in England in 1966---is an autobiographical novel describing an ambitious young woman's efforts to become a "real New York writer" only to sink into mental illness and despair at her inability to operate within the narrow confines of traditional feminine expectations. Plath was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. In recent years, there have been a number of biographies and critical evaluations of Plath's work.
Emily Arnold McCully, Author and illustrator Emily McCully was born in Galesburg, Illinois and raised on Long Island. Her father Wade was a writer of network radio shows and her mother Kathryn was a teacher. When she was a child, she began writing and illustrating her own stories, bound them and gave them a copyright date. She also illustrated postcards, greeting cards, scenery, portraits and copies of the old masters and would then set up a stand at the end of her driveway to sell them. McCully attended Pembroke University studying theater and art history. After graduation, McCully held a variety of odd jobs in the art field that included being a commercial artist, a designer of paperback… covers and illustrating advertisements. When one of her illustrations was seen on an advertisement in the subway, she was asked to illustrate Greg Panetta's "Sea Beach Express." She accepted that offer and went on to illustrate over 100 children's books. In 1969, she illustrated de Jong's "Journey from the Peppermint Express," which was the first children's book to receive the National Book Award. McCully had her first solo venture with "Picnic," which is a wordless picture book about a family of mice, and it won the Christopher Award in 1985. "Mirette on the High Wire" introduced the dare devil tightrope walker, Mirette, and won the Caldecott Medal in 1993. Some of her other titles in include "Amazing Felix," "Crossing the New Bridge," "Grandmas at the Lake," "My Real Family," and "Pirate Queen."