Sylvia Plath | Typed letter signed, to Edith & William Hughes, "the prospect of driving to California", 24 May 1959

Sylvia Plath

Typed letter signed, to Edith and William Hughes ("Dear Ted's mother & dad")

on their lives in Boston and plans for the summer ("...The prospect of driving to California and Mexico -- if we can only get our apartment sublet for those two summer months -- is making us work harder than ever..."), a recent visit from a Unitarian minister ("...He is full of stories and good humor and has done all sorts of things, farming, visiting the concentration camps on a relief mission after the war, and knows, or did know, all the poets in England and America and has an amazing collection of poetry & Irish books..."), 1 page, folio (254 x 203mm), cream airmail stationery, nicked at left margin

"...We have both finished books of verse-stories for children & are waiting to hear about them, both about finished a book of poems, and Ted is finishing his play, and I several stories which are better than any I have written yet..."

Their final months in Boston had been a highly productive period, as Plath reports. She had recently submitted her children's book The Bed Book (it would remain unpublished until 1976) as well as Hughes's Meet My Folks! Hughes had by now written most of Lupercal and Plath, whose poetry had developed significantly with the influence of Boston-based poets such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, was pleased with the poems she had prepared for a collection that was now entitled The Devil of the Stairs. Hughes had won the prestigious $5000 Guggenheim Prize in April, but Plath was to be disappointed when she did not win the Yale Younger Poets Prize. They were now looking forward to their summer holiday driving across America.

LITERATURE

The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume Two, pp.319-20