Product Description The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful -- but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother, and with the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is rare in any novel. It points to the fact that The Bell Jar is a largely autobiographical work about Plath's own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and went through a breakdown. It reveals so much about the sources of Sylvia Plath's own tragedy that its publication was considered a landmark in literature. "Esther Greenwood's account of her years in The Bell Jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing ... [This] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures; it is literature." -New York TimesThis special 25th-anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Frances McCullough,who was the Harper & Row editor for the original edition, about the untold story of The Bell Jar's first American publication. Review "An enchanting book. The author wears her scholarship with grace, and the amazing story she has to tell is recounted with humor and understanding." Novel by Sylvia Plath, first published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, and later published under her real name. Plath committed suicide one month after the publication of The Bell Jar, her only novel. This thinly veiled autobiography details the life of Esther Greenwood, a college woman who struggles through a mental breakdown in the 1950s. Plath examines coming of age in a hypocritical world in this painfully introspective novel, which is noted for its symbolic use of bottles and jars and black and white colors and its symbols of imprisonment and death.The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of LiteratureSylvia Plath's autobiographical novel is a somber, circling journey through a severe depression. Nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood, on a one-month internship with a fashion magazine in New York City in the early 1950s, wonders what life is all about and feels increasingly confused by her thoughts. When she returns to her mother's home, Esther's feelings of despair become apparent. The reader is awake with Esther when she hasn't slept for seven days, fourteen days, twenty-one days, and feels her suffering when she refuses to wash her clothes or hair because "it seem[s] so silly." At her mother's insistence, Esther sees a doctor who asks her what she thinks is wrong. Contemplating her response, she realizes the question "made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong." She is given shock treatment - "a great jolt [that] drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant" - which causes her to wonder what she had done to deserve this. Later, she spends extended time in private sanitariums. Her awareness throughout her ordeal that many of the accepted realities of life are not her realities makes her struggle even more heart-wrenching. Her pain is real and tangible and it is with sadness the reader learns that Sylvia Plath committed suicide only one month after The Bell Jar's publication. --Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith About the Author Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel,