Sylvia Plath , one of the most acclaimed American writers of the twentieth century, was born on 27 October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her writing was intensely autobiographical, often dealing with her troubled relationship with her father, who died when she was eight, as well as her mental illness, which she struggled with throughout her life until her suicide on 11 February 1963. Her only novel, The Bell Jar (1963), published a few weeks before her death, is a semi-fictionalized account of her lapse into and recovery from her first depressive episode, which occurred during her undergraduate years. Her most well-known works are her poetry collections The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965) and the posthumously published The Collected Poems (1981), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982.