A Rare Look at the Work of Young Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath became a published writer early in life. She published a poem in the Boston Herald’s children’s section when she was only 8. While Plath’s personal life has been intensely disssected—few discussions of her work omit mentions of her lifelong depression, her marriage to Ted Hughes, and of course, her suicide—we rarely get a glimpse at the young, precocious child she was.

The New York Public Library holds several notebooks and other personal items from Plath’s childhood, but they have not been made available to the public—visiting hours are by appointment for researchers only. But the NYC experts at Gothamist recently got in with a video camera to take a rare look at her childhood drawings of cats, her collections of poems she admired, and her own poetry and stories, written when she was as young as 8.

The video isn’t embeddable, but you can check it out on Gothamist.