Star Quality
Smithies Create
Published January 15, 2022
Red Comet, Heather Clark’s biography of Sylvia Plath ’55, racked up accolades in 2021.
It was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize before making The New York Times list of 10 Best Books of 2021, announced on November 30. “It’s daring to undertake a new biography of Plath, whose life, and death by suicide at 30 in 1963, have been thoroughly picked over by scholars,” New York Times Book Review editors wrote in making the announcement. “Yet this meticulously researched and, at more than 1,000 pages, unexpectedly riveting portrait is a monumental achievement.”
RED COMET: THE SHORT LIFE AND BLAZING ART OF SYLVIA PLATH
By Heather Clark
Knopf, October 2020
This story appears as part of the Smithies Create column in the Winter 2022 issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.