Sylvia Plath

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels

“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

“As clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing.”—New York Times

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, a poignant exploration of a young woman’s struggle to navigate modern life and womanhood in mid-century America, is her seminal work and an enduring classic that has proven to be just as relevant today as it was when originally published in 1963.

Esther Greenwood—brilliant, beautiful, and enormously talented—is about to embark on what should be the most exciting season of her life: a summer spent in New York City, interning for a magazine.

But even though the life that is unfurling before her is everything she wants, she feels apart from it, unable to live in her life the way the other girls staying at the women's hotel seem able to do.

And the further apart she feels from the noise and color of life around her, especially after she returns home to Massachusetts, the more she begins to collapse in on herself, slowly slipping farther and farther beneath the waves of her despair as treatment after treatment proves ineffectual.

Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s mind with such intensity that her breakdown feels visceral and real, one that makes the early days of her recovery feel even more fragile. Plath's exploration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.