A closer look at Ariel

the long version

A memoir of the author's deep friendship at Smith and Harvard with the late Sylvia Plath, whose legend and following since her suicide have taken on increasing dimensions. Outwardly an All-American girl, inheritor of a century of"middle-class proprieties," Sylvia Plath lived a dual life--an "aggressive achiever" and winner of all sorts of honors during her undergrad days, later, famed for her autobiography novel, "The Bell Jar", and such books of her poetry as "The Collossus" and "Ariel", but inwardly an "imminent volcano" strung out on her imagined secret guilt for the death of a father she lost when only a child.