Sylvia Plath was an American poet and author who is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry. Her works include The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and the semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963), which was published one month before her suicide. Plath's Collected Poems were published posthumously in 1981, and she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982 for this collection, making her the fourth person to receive this honor posthumously.