Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932-1955 is a must-have book for any reader interested in Plath. Detailed yet highly readable, it paints a portrait of a young woman who would become, as will be chronicled in volume 2, one of the seminal authors in the twentieth century.--Paul Alexander, author of Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932-1955 fills the lacunae of existing biographies and uncovers new insights into its subject, as when Plath writes about her experiences at Smith, hearing 'nasty little tag ends of conversation directed at you and around you, meant for you, to strangle you on the invisible noose of insinuation.' Or her months in New York at Mademoiselle, which grow less mysterious here. Again, Carl Rollyson has provided us with an indispensable book on Sylvia Plath.--Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life as well as biographies of Gertrude Stein, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and others The details in Rollyson's Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932-1955 are a dream come true for the reader, fan, and scholar of Sylvia Plath. The seeds of so much of her creative writing are present, but Rollyson deftly does not foreshadow how events impact Plath's life and when she transforms experiences from life to art. He lets each moment stand on its own importance.

--Peter K. Steinberg, coeditor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath.