P&P Live! Heather Clark — RED COMET - in conversation with Peter K. Steinberg

With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews--Heather Clark's Red Comet brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s.

Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more. Clark's clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems.

Clark will be in conversation with Peter K. Steinberg, author of the biography Sylvia Plath and the ‘Introduction’ to The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath. He has published several articles on Plath and is a co-editor of the two-volume The Letters of Sylvia Plath, and a co-author of These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath

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