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Anne Gray Harvey was born into an upper-middle class family in Newton, Massachusetts on November 9, 1928. She attended Rogers Preparatory School and a Boston finishing school known as The Garland School. In 1948, she eloped with Alfred Muller Sexton just a few months before her twentieth birthday. Anne Sexton received a scholarship from the Hart Agency in Boston, and worked there as a model for a brief time. Sexton later moved from Boston to Baltimore, back to Boston and then to San Francisco.
In 1953, Sexton moved back to Massachusetts where her first daughter Linda Gray Sexton was born. The following year, Sexton was hospitalized at Westwood Lodge for emotional disturbances. Several months later, Anna "Nana" Ladd Dingley, Sexton's beloved great-aunt, died. In 1955, Sexton's second daughter Joyce Ladd Sexton was born. Soon afterward Sexton was admitted to a mental hospital. Eight months later, Sexton attempted suicide.
The following month she began writing poetry at the insistence of her psychiatrist, Sexton enrolled in John Holme's poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Based on the quality of her first work, Sexton received a scholarship in 1958 to Antioch Writers' Conference and worked with W. D. Snodgrass.
That same year, she was accepted into Robert Lowell's graduate writing seminar at Boston University. It was while attending Boston University that she forged friendships with Sylvia Plath, Maxine In 1959, Sexton's mother, Mary Gray Staples Harvey, died of cancer, and her father, Ralph Churchill Harvey, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. In August of that year, Sexton received the Robert Frost Fellowship to attend the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. She later was hospitalized that year for pneumonia, an appendectomy and an ovariectomy. By the end of 1959 she was back on her feet and delivered the Morris Gray Poetry In 1960, Sexton published TO BEDLAM AND PART WAY BACK.
It was also in this year that she studied with Philip Rate and Irving Howe at Brandeis University and forged a friendship with James Write. In 1961, Sexton and Maxine Kevin were appointed to be the first scholars in poetry at the Radcliff Institute for Independent Study. Sexton also taught poetry and writing at Harvard and Radcliffe that year. In 1962, Sexton was hospitalized for depression at Westwood Lodge. In November, she was awarded the Levinson Prize from POETRY. In 1963, ALL MY PRETTY ONES was nominated for the National Book Award.
She was awarded the Ford Foundation grant for residence with the Charles Playhouse in Boston. By the end of the year, she toured Europe on the first Traveling Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1964, SELECTED POEMS as published in England. She toured Europe with her husband, moved into a new home and started seeing a new psychiatrist. In 1965, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was given the first literary magazine travel award from the International Congress of Cultural Freedom. In 1966, Sexton attempted suicide after beginning a novel that she never finished.
A month following this suicide attempt, she and her husband went on an African safari. On her thirty-eighth birthday, she was hospitalized for a broken hip. In 1967, Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for LIVE OR DIE, and also received the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America. In July of 1967, she read at the International Poetry Festival in London and toured England. Later that year, she taught at Wayland High School. Sexton received an honorary Phi Beta Kappa award from Harvard in 1968.
She taught poetry in McLean's Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. In 1969, she served as editorial consultant to the NEW YORK POETRY QUARTERLY, and was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in April of that year. She also began seeing a new Psychiatrist in 1969, and in June of that year received an honorary Phi Beta Kappa award from Radcliffe University. She began teaching at Boston University, worked at the American Place Theatre in New York on 45 MERCY STREET and conducted workshops in her home for Oberlin College Independent Study students. In 1970, before another suicide attempt, Sexton served on the board of directors of AUDIENCE magazine and was made honorary Doctor of Letters at Tufts University.
Sexton made full professor at Boston University in 1972 and was awarded the Crashaw Chair in Literature at Colgate University. Later that year, Fairfeild University awarded Sexton an honorary Doctor of Letters. In 1973, she received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Regis College, served on the Pulitzer Prize jury, and lectured at Breadloaf Writer's Conference. An operatic adaptation of her work, TRANSFORMATIONS, was performed in Minneapolis. Sexton divorced her husband and was hospitalized at both McLean's Hospital in August and Human Resources Bibliography: Encyclopedias Encarta and Britannica and Salt and Hispanic.
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Research essay sample on Pulitzer Prize Attempted Suicide
