Book

The bell jar : a novel / Sylvia Plath ; foreword by Frances McCullough ; biographical note by Lois Ames ; drawings by Sylvia Plath.

Plath, Sylvia. (Author). McCullough, Fran, 1939- (Added Author). Ames, Lois. (Added Author).

Summary:

Chronicles one young woman's emotional breakdown as she journeys from the glamorous world of Manhattan publishing to the isolation of the asylum.

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful -- but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother, and with the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is rare in any novel. It points to the fact that The Bell Jar is a largely autobiographical work about Plath's own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and went through a breakdown. It reveals so much about the sources of Sylvia Plath's own tragedy that its publication was considered a landmark in literature. -- Publisher description.

Record details

ISBN: 9780061148514
ISBN: 0061148512
ISBN: 9780060174903
ISBN: 0060174900
Physical Description: xvii, 244 pages, 22 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Edition: 50th anniversary ed.
Publisher: New York : HarperPerennial, 2013, ©1996.

Content descriptions

General Note:	25th anniversary edition published 1996, reissued as the 50th anniversary edition in 2013.
Study Program Information Note:	Accelerated Reader AR UG 7.2 11 8651.