The Bell Jar - 25th Edition by Sylvia Plath (Hardcover)

About the Book

The Bell Jar has become a classic of American literature and has sold more than two million copie in the U.S. An extraordinary work, it chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood--beautiful, brilliant, successful and slowly going under. This gift edition includes a forward by the original editor who reveals the untold story of the book's first publication.

Book Synopsis

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels

"A coming-of-age masterpiece." --Boston Globe

"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." --USA Today

Sylvia Plath's masterwork--an acclaimed and enduring novel about a young woman falling into the grip of mental illness and societal pressures

Esther Greenwood is a bright, beautiful, enormously talented young woman, but she's slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her neurosis becomes palpably real, even rational--as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.

From the Back Cover

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother and the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is rare in any novel. It points to the fact that The Bell Jar is a largely autobiographical work about Plath's own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and went through a breakdown. It reveals so much about the sources of Sylvia Plath's own tragedy that its publication was considered a landmark in literature. This special twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Frances McCullough, who was the Harper & Row editor for the original edition, about the untold story of The Bell Jar's first American publication.

Review Quotes

"An enchanting book. The author wears her scholarship with grace, and the amazing story she has to tell is recounted with humor and understanding." - Atlantic Monthly

"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." - USA Today

"Esther Greenwood's account of her years in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing. . . . [This] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures: it is literature." - New York Times

"The first-person narrative fixes us there, in the doctor's office, in the asylum, in the madness, with no reassuring vacations when we can keep company with the sane and listen to their lectures." - Washington Post Book World