西爾維婭·普拉斯(1932—1963)，美國著名女詩人，小說傢。詩集《龐然大物》、《愛麗爾》被認為是1960年代“自白派”詩歌的代錶作。八歲那年父親去世後，她便不斷在詩中歌吟死亡，也曾多次試圖自殺。1956年，與英國著名詩人特德·休斯一見鍾情，閃電結婚。1962年兩人分居。1963年她的自傳體小說《鍾形罩》齣版三周後，她自殺身亡。普拉斯的詩歌是20世紀的一個奇跡，在她死後多年為她贏得瞭普利策詩歌奬。

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful -- but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother, and with the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies.

Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is rare in any novel. It points to the fact that The Bell Jar is a largely autobiographical work about Plath's own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and went through a breakdown. It reveals so much about the sources of Sylvia Plath's own tragedy that its publication was considered a landmark in literature.

"Esther Greenwood's account of her years in The Bell Jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing ... [This] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures; it is literature." -New York Times

This special 25th-anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Frances McCullough,who was the Harper & Row editor for the original edition, about the untold story of The Bell Jar's first American publication.