by Sylvia Plath
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Sylvia Plath and Marcia Brown, ‘In Retrospect: A Plea for Moderation’, Princeton Tiger, 4 May 1951, 14–15.
*Olive Milne Smith Glaser (1929– ); B.A. 1951, education and child studies, Smith College.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Probably Sylvia Plath, ‘The Imagery in Patterns’; held by Lilly Library.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Richard Norton to Sylvia Plath, 9 April 1951; held by Lilly Library.
*Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dali was shown at Graham Hall, Smith College.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Edith Sitwell, The Canticle of the Rose: Poems 1917–1949 (New York: Vanguard Press, 1949); SP’s copy held by Smith College; used for her English 11b theme paper ‘A New Idiom’; held by Lilly Library.
*Albert Pierpont Madeira (1911–64) and Beatrice vom Baur Madeira. Madeira was instructor in English, Smith College, 1948–51; taught SP’s section of English 11, 1950–1.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Davis Center, a student common room on the campus of Smith College.
*The Frank Newhall Look Memorial Park, Florence, Mass.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Louis Manzi (1915–99); art instructor, Smith College, 1949–51.
*Edward Allen White (1932– ); schoolmate of SP’s in Wellesley, class of 1949. Giesey and White married on 25 June 1954.
*Richard Norton to SP, 15 April 1951; held by Lilly Library.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Anne Blodgett Mayo (1918–90) and Dr Frederic B. Mayo (1915–2000). During the summer of 1951, SP took care of their three children: Frederic (1944– ), Esther (‘Pinny’) (1947– ), and Joanne (1949– ), at their home at 144 Beach Bluff Avenue, Swampscott, Mass.
*Elizabeth (‘Betty’) Cannon Aldrich. Wife of C. Duane Aldrich, who lived across the street from the Plaths at 23 Elmwood Road, Wellesley. The Aldriches had nine children: Duane, Peter, Stephen, John, Mark, Elizabeth, Ann, Amy, and Sarah.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Probably Clara Ford, who along with her husband Joseph F. Ford, was a scholarship fund donor at Smith College.
*Founded in 1909, the Whiffenpoofs are an a capella group consisting of 14 Yale senior men.
*Richard Norton to SP, 21 April 1951; held by Lilly Library.
*Oliver Trull Carpenter (c. 1930–89); B.A. 1952, Yale College. Carpenter was a member of the Whiffenpoofs in 1952.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Probably Richard Norton to SP, 24 April 1951; held by Lilly Library.
*Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942).
*Date supplied from postmark.
*A brand of women’s clothing.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘A New Idiom’; held by Lilly Library.
*‘When you aren’t a mememb member’ appears in the original.
*The illustration was by Floyd Johnson (1932– ), from Topeka, Kansas.
*Date supplied from postmark and internal evidence.
*See Eddie Cohen to SP, 3 May 1951, and Richard Norton to SP, 3 May 1951; held by Lilly Library.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Date supplied from internal evidence. Dated ‘May ‘51’ by Ann Davidow-Goodman.
*Eddie Cohen to SP, [11 April 1951]; held by Lilly Library.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*Jonathan Edwards; a ‘residential college’ at Yale.
*Richard Norton to ASP, 12 May 1951; held by Lilly Library.
*See SP to ASP, 25 April 1951.
*Probably Lucy S. Wheaton (1903–97) of 23 Rumford Street, Concord, New Hampshire. Married to public school principal Harvey H. Wheaton; mother of David S. Wheaton (1930– 2001). SP and Richard Norton visited the Wheatons on Saturday–Sunday 26–7 May 1951.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*George Swinton (1917–2002), art instructor, Smith College, 1950–3.
*Elizabeth Storer Paynter (1929– ); B.A. 1951, American Studies, Smith College, SP’s housemate at Haven House.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Letter misdated ‘6/1’ by Marcia Stern. Date supplied from internal evidence.
*Plath wrote the following footnote on the bottom of the first page: ‘1. Really not, I’m only-using-up-stationery, (Wellesley Press, June 6, 1951)’.
*SP’s poetic epigraph is a play on Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’.
*Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil (New York: Modern Library, 1921); SP’s copy held by Lilly Library.
*John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle (New York: Modern Library, 1936); SP’s copy held by Lilly Library.
*William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying (New York: Modern Library, [1946]); SP’s copy held by Smith College.
*John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Bantam Books, 1946); SP’s copy held by Lilly Library.
*Richard Wright, Native Son; the location of SP’s copy is unknown.
*Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Bantam Books, 1949); SP’s copy held by Lilly Library.
*William Faulkner, Sanctuary (New York: New American Library, 1950); SP’s copy held by Lilly Library.
*Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth; the location of SP’s copy is unknown.
*Philip Emerald McCurdy (1935– ); B.A. 1956, Harvard College; SP’s friend from Wellesley.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*Probably Edward G. Huey, What Makes the Wheels Go Round: A First-time Physics (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940).
*David William Norton (1944– ); youngest brother of Richard Norton.
*Probably Pamela Lewis Kent (1932– ); SP’s classmate from Wellesley High School; B.A. 1954, Connecticut College; resident of Chatham, Mass.
*Alfred Whitney Griswold (1906–63); President of Yale, 1950–63. President Griswold delivered his first Baccalaureate Address in Woolsey Hall at 11 a.m. on Sunday, 10 June 1951. Senior Class Day Exercises followed in the afternoon. Yale University’s 250th Commencement was held at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, 11 June 1951 in the Old Campus.
*An amusement park in West Haven, Connecticut.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*The first page of this letter is formatted like a double-column newspaper article.
*During the summer of 1951, Marcia Brown (later Marcia B. Stern) took care of the children of Esther Blodgett Meyer (1916–2006); B.A. 1937, Smith College. Meyer’s children were staying in Swampscott, Mass., with their grandparents John Henry Blodgett (1881– 1971) and Ruth Sargent Paine Blodgett (1890–1967); B.A. 1912, Smith College. The Meyer children were G. Christian Meyer, Ann Meyer Wood, and Holly Meyer Humphrey.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Northeast Airlines pilot W. Peter Carey (1917–94); B.A. 1939, psychology, Yale, resident of Pierson College; married in 1941 to Madelyn Noyes Carey (1917–2012); pilot in the Air Transport Command during World War II; father of Tamsin (1942– ), Pamela (1944– ), Falda (1947– ), Madelyn Leli (1949– ), Amanda (1953– ), Martha (1958–2005) and Peter Noyes Carey.
*Richard Norton to SP, 16 June 1951; held by Lilly Library.
*John H. Blodgett, Jr (1927–2002) and Donald W. Blodgett (1930–2002) were brothers of Esther Blodgett Meyer (1916–2006) and Anne Blodgett Mayo (1918–90).
*J. Melvin Woody (1933– ); B.A. 1956, Yale College; M.A. 1960, Ph.D. (philosophy) 1964, Yale University; dated SP, 1954.
*The letter was misdated by SP.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘I Am An American’. The first stanza matches a typescript copy held by the Lilly Library. The second stanza is a variation after the first line.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Possibly Frederick Rodney Holt (1935– ); B.Sc. 1961, Ohio State University; mathematician and one of the first employees of Apple Computers; Warren Plath’s friend from Wellesley, 1947–53.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*Probably Eddie Cohen to SP, [19 May 1951]; held by Lilly Library.
*Possibly Susan Haskell (1932–2006) of Marblehead, Mass., who went to Bradford Junior College, 1950–2, and Smith College, 1952–3.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*This paragraph is written up the left margin of the page with an arrow placed between the preceding and following paragraph.
*Muriel Friedman (Reader Mail Editor, Seventeen) to SP, 28 June 1951, included two such letters dated 3 May and 7 May 1951, from readers in Rhode Island and Tennessee, respectively; see SP’s publications scrapbook, Lilly Library, p. 13.
*The first line is from the poem ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley; the second is original to SP.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Davenport Plumer III (1932– ); B.A. 1955, Dartmouth College; married SP’s friend Marcia Brown on 15 June 1954 in Dartmouth, New Hampshire; SP served as bridesmaid; divorced 1969.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*‘ringed with lobsters olives’ appears in the original.
*SP also wrote about this day in her later poem ‘The Babysitters’, written on 29 October 1961.
*According to ‘The Babysitters’, the book read was Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (1942).
*Children’s Island, off Marblehead, Mass.
*Eastern Yacht Club, 47 Foster Street, Marblehead.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*According to SP’s calendar, this was Bob Michael. Probably Robert Michael; B.A. 1953, Dartmouth College.
*The Corinthian Yacht Club, 1 Nahant Street, Marblehead, Mass.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Probably ‘The United States and Asia: Mademoiselle’s Eighth College Forum’, Mademoiselle, August 1951, 276–9, 359–71.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Richard Norton to SP, 14 August 1951; held by Lilly Library. SP slightly misquotes Norton, who wrote, `No vital message this, but an affirmation of the plan to stop in at 144 B.B.A., S, M. on next Monday morning.’
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*SP spoke at the Smith College Club meeting on 21 September 1951.
*SP used words and imagery from these lines in her poems ‘Jilted’ and ‘Crossing the Equinox’.
*Letter misdated by SP.
*During the summer of 1951, Perry Norton worked at Lathams, a restaurant in Brewster, Mass., with senior cook Joseph Crowley and Perry’s roommate Richard Newell (1928– ); B.A. 1951, Boston University; M.D. 1956, Boston University School of Medicine; 20 June 1953 ‘Rit’ married Beverly L. Newell (1929– ); B.S. 1950, education, Wheelock College.
*Ray Moore, visual artist from the Deep South and friend of Ann Davidow-Goodman.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*See Sylvia Plath’s High School Scrapbook, p 57. The negatives are no longer with the letter.
*Northampton State Hospital, Northampton, Mass., home to nearly 2,500 patients in the 1950s. SP was interested in working, in some capacity, at the hospital to gain experience for her writing. See SP to ASP, 12 December 1952.
*SP wrote news releases about Smith College for local papers, including the Springfield Daily News, the Springfield Union, the Springfield Sunday Republican, and the Daily Hampshire Gazette, as a Press Board correspondent, 1951–4.
*During her second year at Smith College, SP completed Art 210 (drawing and painting) taught by H. George Cohen; English 211 (nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature) taught by Helen Whitcomb Randall and Elizabeth A. Drew; English 220 (practical writing) taught by Evelyn Page; Government 11 (introduction to politics) taught by Alan Burr Overstreet and Vera Micheles Dean; Physical Education 2 (dance and sports); and Religion 14 (introduction to religion) taught by Virginia Corwin and Stephen Trowbridge Crary.
*German-born theologian, philosopher, and writer Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965); his Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1933).
*The schedule is no longer with the letter.
*Richard Norton to Sylvia Plath, 25 September 1951; held by Lilly Library.
*A note in ASP’s hand identifies Mrs D as ‘Mrs D – Ditiberio’. Probably Olga DiTiberio who lived at 144 Weston Road, Wellesley.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Edith Hirsch (1932– ); transferred from the University of Colorado; married Edward M. Hull on 7 June 1953; withdrew from Smith College on 28 September 1953.
*Joan Dutton Romig (1934– ); B.A. 1955, government, Smith College.
*According to SP’s calendar, this was Donald Pogue Arrowsmith (1931–2012).
*A DEKE is a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*On 6 October 1951, Mr and Mrs William F. Buckley hosted a supper dance at their home in Sharon, Connecticut, in honour of their daughter Maureen Buckley O’Reilly.
*Probably a reference to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Mass. Isabella Stewart Gardner was married to John ‘Jack’ Lowell Gardner, and was referred to as ‘Mrs. Jack’. SP visited the museum on 21 April 1945 and wrote in her diary: ‘I cleaned most of the upstairs today to show my family I could do some work at home. I rode my bicycle to a fire later, and when I came home I had lunch and mother and I left for the Mrs Jack Gardener Art Palace! We were taken on a tour of the building and shown all the works of art. I saw the painting “The Dancer” by Sargeant in the special wing built just for it. I saw the beautiful flower court and climbing nastursiums trailed down the sides over two stories! . . . ’
*Fergus Reid Buckley (1930–2014); American writer, speaker, and educator; B.A. 1952, Yale College.
*Carl Bradley; B.A. 1952, Yale College.
*Probably Eric Lane Wilson (1932–2009); 1955, Yale College.
*Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff (1930–2011); B.S. 1952, geological engineering, Princeton University; 1st lieutenant artillery Army of the United States, 1952–4, Korea; LL.B. 1957, Columbia University; dated SP, 1951–2.