Anne Sexton (1928–1974) Cinderella, The Farmer's Wife, Starry Night LINKS The American of American Poets - Poetry Exhibits: Anne Sexton http://www.poets.org/lit/poet/asexton.htm This site contains a brief biography of Sexton, a selected bibliography, the texts of several of her poems, and a list of links. BIOGRAPHY Anne Sexton (1928–1974) Born in Newton, Massachusetts, Sexton attended Garland Junior College and Boston University, where she studied under Robert Lowell. She worked for a year as a fashion model in Boston and later wrote her first poetry collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), while recovering from a nervous breakdown. Writing a poem almost every day was successful therapy for her. From 1961 to 1963, Sexton was a scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. A confessional poet, Sexton acknowledged her debt to W. D. Snodgrass, whose collection of poetry, Heart's Needle (1959), influenced her profoundly. Her second collection, All My Pretty Ones (1962), includes a quote from a letter by Franz Kafka that expresses her own literary philosophy: "A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us." Live or Die (1967), her third collection of poems, won a Pulitzer Prize. She committed suicide in 1974.