The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.Determined not to read Plath s work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath s scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment, and evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century, in the shadow of the atom ...