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Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) is often grouped with such poets as Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and Robert Lowell as a leading figure in the so-called ‘Confessional Movement’. Born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts into an upper middle-class home, Sexton never felt comfortable with the conventional path this background laid out for her. She had a fraught relationship with her alcoholic business-man father, and her mother whose own literary ambitions had been thwarted by domestic life. Sexton’s formal education ended at Garland Junior College when she eloped with Alfred Muller ‘Kayo’ Sexton II at the age of nineteen. After her marriage, Sexton worked for a short time as a model, before giving birth to her first daughter in 1953 and a second in 1955. After both births she suffered depression which led to mental breakdown, hospitalisation and her first suicide attempt. The cyclical nature of her mental illness caused Sexton much anguish throughout her adult life. It was at the suggestion of her long-time therapist, Dr Martin Orne, that she b

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Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, on November 9, 1928. She attended boarding school at Rogers Hall Lowell, Massachusetts, where she first started writing poetry. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen. Sexton and her husband spent time in San Francisco before moving back to Massachusetts for the birth of their first daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, in 1953.

After her second daughter was born in 1955, Sexton was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest in poetry that she had developed in high school. In the fall of 1957, she joined writing groups in Boston that introduced her to many writers such as Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath. She published her first two books, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), with Houghton Mifflin.

In 1965, Sexton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. She then went on to win the 1967 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third collection, Live or Die (Houghton Mifflin,

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Anne Sexton: Her Life Outside Poetry

Anne Sexton was a 1950’s housewife with no clear direction to her life, struggling with what today is known as bipolar disorder. Unable to care well for her children or herself, she was hospitalized. Afterwards she wrote a couple of poems about her struggles and showed them to her therapist. He told her to pursue poetry. Within just a few years, she became one of the most talked about poets of her generation, on her way to winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This is a brief story of her foreshortened life.

Childhood: Becoming Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was born November 9, 1928, as Anne Gray Harvey in Massachusetts. She was the youngest child of a wealthy couple who lived an F. Scott Fitzgerald lifestyle: an endless round of parties, heavy drinking, and conversation with the three daughters presented as ornaments to the guests. Her father, Ralph Churchill Harvey (1900-1959), was a wool merchant, and her mother, Mary Gray Staples (1901-1959) was an intelligent, glamorous socialite.

The family spent summers on Squirrel Island in