A prominent practitioner of confessional poetry, Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was born in Newton, Massachusetts. After a psychiatric breakdown, she studied under Robert Lowell at Boston University, in a circle that included Sylvia Plath. Live or Die (Houghton Mifflin, 1966) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967. Other works include To Bedlam and Part Way Back (Houghton Mifflin, 1960) and Transformations (Houghton Mifflin, 1971), a retelling of Grimm fairy tales in verse. She held a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
