Short Synopsis
From Carl Rollyson, a startling new vision of Sylvia Plath—the first to draw from the recently-opened Ted Hughes archive.

Full Synopsis
The life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of myth. Educated at Smith, she had an epically conflict-filled relationship with her mother, Aurelia. She then married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the Sturm und Drang of married life in the full glare of the world of English and American letters. Her poems were fought over, rejected, accepted and, ultimately, embraced by readers everywhere. Dead at thirty, she committed suicide by putting her head in an oven while her children slept.
 
Her poetry collection titled Ariel became a modern classic. Her novel The Bell Jar has a fixed place on student reading lists. American Isis will be the first Plath bio benefiting from the new Ted Hughes archive at the British Library which includes forty-one letters between Plath and Hughes as well as a host of unpublished papers. The Sylvia Plath Carl Rollyson brings to us in American Isis is no shrinking violet overshadowed by Ted Hughes, she is a modern day Isis, a powerful force that embraced high and low culture to establish herself  in the literary firmament.

"Engagingly read by actor George Newbern." ---Library Journal Audio Review

"The figure that emerges from Rollyson's study is certainly compelling, and very much a woman of her moment and culture." ---Publishers Weekly

"Carl Rollysons impeccably researched, compulsively readable life of Sylvia Plath is likely to remain for years to come the definitive biography of this complex, fascinating woman." ---Donald Spoto, author of High Society

"Garbo, Garland, Monroe, Plath, thrilling divas one and all. Carl Rollyson's American Isis is a tour de force that reinvents Sylvia Plath for the 21st century." ---Marion Meade, author of Lonelyhearts

"Rollyson unveils brilliant, driven, spotlight-craving Plath as an exceptional, trailblazing artist who pushed herself to be a goddess until she could do no more." ---Booklist Starred Review

Booklist Review