Sylvia Plath's 87th Birthday, Google Doodle Today

Google Doodle Today Celebrates the acclaimed American writer Sylvia Plath's 87th Birthday, whose painfully honest poetry and prose gave voice to the author’s innermost emotions in ways that touched generations of readers. “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative,” wrote Plath, whose work helped many understand mental illness. “Whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.”

Sylvia Plath's 87th Birthday, Google Doodle Today

Born in Boston on this day in 1932, Sylvia Plath grew up with her father, a strict German and biology teacher specializing in the study of bees. Showing an early talent for writing, Plath was published in national publications, won awards, worked as an editor, and graduated from Smith College with honors—all despite suffering a mental breakdown. Her works often used heavy imagery and metaphors, set amongst scenes of winter and frost, as shown in today's Doodle.

After college, Plath earned a Fulbright scholarship and traveled to England. In 1982, she won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously. While her children’s book, The It-Doesn’t-Matter-Suit, shows a lighter side of her creativity, her poems were described by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates as reading “as if they’ve been chiseled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of arctic ice.”

“How she longed for winter then! –
Scrupulously austere in its order
Of white and black
Ice and rock, each sentiment in the border,
And heart’s frosty discipline
Exact as a snowflake.”

—Sylvia Plath, “Spinster”