7 Literary Biographies To Read After You Finish 'Salinger'

The short, tumultuous life of this powerful poet has been chronicled by many. (In fact, her life has been of such interest to biographers that The New Yorker's Janet Malcolm published a three-part series on this phenomenon.) And to mark the passage of 50 years since her death, two new Plath biographies came out this year. Mad Girl's Love Song by Andrew Wilson looks at Sylvia's life before meeting her husband Ted Hughes, a poet himself. For a work on the entirety of her short life, though, you might turn to Carl Rollyson's American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, out this year, or Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, which Malcolm called the best Plath biography available. (This writer agrees.)

Saul Bellow's Heart is more intimate than your typical biography since it was written by the Nobel prize-winning author's son, Greg Bellow. This memoir-biography focuses on Greg's relationship with his father, who possessed something of a chilly heart, according to a Guardian critic: "If you've ever read anything about the great man's private life you might suppose the title of his son's memoir is intended ironically, or that it's one of those deliberately incongruous couplings..."

The life of this so-called dark lady of letters has been chronicled in Susan Sontag: A Making of an Icon. Although mostly an outsider's look at this intellectual's life, the biography does contextualize Sontag's important contribution to American thinking well. For a more behind-the-scene view of this celebrity intellectual, watch out for the recently commissioned authorized biography, which will be published in the next few years.

A confessional poet like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton's poetry explored the ups and downs of American domestic life in the century's middle years. Diane Middlebrook's Anne Sexton: A Biography is a compassionate and wise look at this poet's sometime sensational life, according to a New York Times critic.

In The Voice is All, Joyce Johnson charts the life of famous Beat writer Jack Kerouac. Like Saul Bellow's Heart, this biography is a very familiar account of the writer's life since Johnson and Kerouac were lovers for two years.

Known for her feisty reviews and observant novels, Mary McCarthy was one of the reigning female intellectuals of The Partisan Review scene during the middle decades of the twentieth century. A biographical account of her life, Seeing Mary Plain, is an oral history based on the author's interviews with those who knew McCarthy. For another look at her life, check out Vanity Fair's recent profile of the author and her most famous novel The Group.

A Life of Flannery O'Connor chronicles this novelist's short life. O'Connor, who died from complications of lupus at the age of almost 39, was known for her Southern Gothic novels, which were so popular during her time that Esquire's fiction editor put her at the very center of the magazine's 1963 'Literary Establishment' chart.