The Bell Jar (HarperCollins American Classics)

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, a poignant exploration of a young woman’s struggle to navigate modern life and womanhood in mid-century America, is her seminal work and an enduring classic that has proven to be just as relevant today as it was when originally published in 1963.

Esther Greenwood—brilliant, beautiful, and enormously talented—is about to embark on what should be the most exciting season of her life: a summer spent in New York City, interning for a magazine. But even though the life that is unfurling before her is everything she wants, she feels apart from it, unable to live in her life the way the other girls staying at the women's hotel seem able to do. And the further apart she feels from the noise and color of life around her, especially after she returns home to Massachusetts, the more she begins to collapse in on herself, slowly slipping farther and farther beneath the waves of her despair as treatment after treatment proves ineffectual.