Author, Poetess. The daughter of Aurelia and Otto Plath, Sylvia's father died when she was eight, a trauma that affected her deeply for the rest of her life and became the subject of one of her best known poems, "Daddy." Sylvia was writing from the time she was very small and had her first poem published when she was eight years old; she had stories and poems being published almost constantly for the rest of her life. An excellent student, Sylvia went to Smith College on a scholarship funded by the author Olive Higgins Prouty. In the summer of 1953, Sylvia worked as a guest editor for "Mademoiselle" magazine. After returning home, she suffered a nervous breakdown and tried to kill herself, ending up in the psychiatric ward of Boston's MacLean Hospital. These events in her life later turned up on Sylvia's only novel, "The Bell Jar." She returned to Smith to finish her degree and then went to Cambridge with a Fulbright scholarship, where she met Ted Hughes. Sylvia and Ted were married in 1956 and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. In 1962 the marriage fell apart when Sylvia discovered Ted was having an affair, and she moved with the children from their country home in Devon to a flat in London where Yeats had once resided. During the winter of 1962-1963, Sylvia wrote what are considered some of her best and most famous poems, which were published posthumously by Hughes in a collection titled "Ariel." Early in the morning of February 11, 1963, Sylvia sealed her children in their bedroom, turned on the gas in the kitchen, and killed herself. Among her posthumous works are two editions of her journals, some of her letters home to her mother, a collection of short stories ("Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams"), and her collected poems. Sylvia gained more fame dead than she ever had when alive, and Ted Hughes was forced to replace her headstone several times over, as vandals (who blamed Hughes for her death) chipped off the surname 'Hughes,' leaving just 'Sylvia Plath.'