Existing comment:
Anne Sexton
1928–1974
Born Newton, Massachusetts
Anne Sexton's poetry took up highly personal issues of white middle-class womanhood in the 1950s and 1960s, an era when conventional gender roles were being re-evaluated. Raw and confessional, her poems addressed female sexuality, mental health, and other subjects that were thought of as taboo. Sexton received many honors, including the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Live or Die (1966). After spending much of her adulthood in and out of mental health treatment, by the 1970s, she began losing her fight against bipolar disorder. In 1974, Sexton died by suicide, her personal life echoing the last lines of "Her Kind," a poem that compares a contemporary woman's life to that of a witch: "A woman like that is not ashamed to die. / I have been her kind."
This photograph of Sexton at her home in suburban Newton, Massachusetts, shows her in the writing nook she kept just off of the kitchen.
Rollie McKenna (1918–2003)
Gelatin silver print, 1961 (printed later)
Gift of Rollie McKenna |