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Sylvia Plath, 14 Books

Sylvia Plath, one of the greatest poets and writers of the 20th century, worried that she wasn’t reading fast enough. “I must go on reading and enjoying slowly, and not want to devour the University Library at one desperate gulp,” she wrote to her mother from Smith College in 1952. “Even if I read every hour from now till the end of the year I still would never be close to finishing the ever-expanding list of book ‘I must read!’” She told her mother the same thing four years later: “The pressure is constant, and I am surrounded with a pleasant torture: piles and piles of books, all of which I want so much to read; the pain is that no matter how solidly I work, I never will read enough, and I am always fighting to keep up.”

Here are some of the books that Plath loved, as highlighted in her letters.

This list was originally published in 2019 and was added to this site about 1 year ago.