Read Sylvia Plath: A Biography for Free Online Page B

publications in The Phillipian , a slick-covered junior-high magazine. As a seventh grader, she wrote about nature and moods (“The Spring Parade,” “March,” “Rain”), still deeply in the sentimental tradition of her first published poem, about crickets and fireflies, which appeared when she was eight-and-a-half, in the Boston Sunday Herald . A few months after that publication she had won a $1 prize for a drawing of a woman in a hat. Writing and drawing were important pastimes for Sylvia but she seemed unsure of her friends’ reactions to them, and often justified them in terms of possible payment, or publication, or both. Even when she was a child, just enjoying an activity was not enough reason for spending time on it.
    During junior high, Sylvia made posters and drawings and often sketched in pastels and ink. As a younger child, she had hidden drawings under her mother’s napkins at the dinner table. Now she illustrated her own writing, designed paper dolls and their clothes, and made intricate wrapping paper. Her special occasion cards (labeled “Plathmark” on the back) were prized by her family, especially her grandfather, who carried her artwork in his wallet until the paper was worn through.
    She also wrote a great deal — diary entries, fiction, and poetry. During the summer of 1945 she kept a meticulous diary of her weeks on Cape Cod at Camp Helen Storrow with Betsy Powley. In rounded, perfectly spelled words she described fellow campers, duties, nights around campfires, and her gratefulness for being at the camp. The flair for journalism which was obvious during high school and college first appeared now and pointed to her real gifts in objective writing. In her early poems, Sylvia used some varied rhyme and stanza arrangements but her poems and stories are what one might expect from a gifted adolescent.
    Some of her most interesting writing appears in her letters home from summer camp. Illustrated with stick drawings, they show Sylvia’s old concerns about being good, saving money, and eating a lot (“Lunch — two bowls of vegetable soup, loads of peanut butter, 4 pieces of coffee cake, chocolate cake and marsh-mallow sauce, 3 cups of milk ... Supper — Haddock, 19 carrots, lettuce and tomato, cucumber, punch, 2 potatoes, 4 slices of watermelon”), but she also wrote about camp personnel, the neatness of her room, and her improvement in swimming. The note of economy recurs when she mentions to Aurelia that she was able to buy Kleenex for only 15c, and wonders whether her mother would like her to buy an extra box to bring home, if she were allowed to do so.
    By 1946, Sylvia and Betsy Powley were joined in camp by Ruthie Freeman, Sylvia’s Winthrop friend, and the three of them bet nickels to see who could avoid swearing. Sylvia was known as “Siv” this year. She spent money a bit more casually and wrote more descriptive letters. One of her triumphs at camp was imitating Frank Sinatra in the camp variety show (though Betsy did the actual singing), but otherwise the two weeks away were comparatively unpleasant: the campers got ptomaine poisoning from bad fish; she had an infected toenail and a cold and missed five days of swimming; and she never mastered what she called the “horrid” art of diving.
    Following Sylvia’s July camp, Aurelia took the children to Loungeway farm, the home of a friend in Oxford, Maine, so they could experience farm life. The profile of Sylvia that emerges from these years is of an adolescent dutiful about enjoying the benefits her mother provided. At every turn, she is given vacations, lessons, books, art supplies. But the gifts are not without responsibilities: having such advantages will enable her to excel in even more ways, and her family will be even more proud of her in turn. She wrote in her 1946 diary, after a poem by Sara Teasdale (“Late October”) which she copied onto the page, “What I wouldn’t give to be able to write like this!”
    Sylvia’s