3. Plath would win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Literature – though could her rumored long-lost second novel be her greatest work?
Following her death, Plath’s literary star kept on rising. Her Collected Poems were published in 1981. Ted Hughes wrote an introduction for the work, a fact that angered many of Plath’s admirers, not least since many blamed him for her suicide – a charge that only intensified when his mistress Assia Wevill also killed herself. For her poetry, Plath was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Literature. While Hughes once claimed that she had written most of a second novel, the manuscript was lost at the start of the 1970s. It remains one of the literary world’s most-sought-after items.
