Diane Wood Middlebrook: Biographer, Dies at 68
Diane Wood Middlebrook, a biographer, poet and critic known for her best-selling, controversial life of the poet Anne Sexton, died on Saturday in San Francisco. She was 68.
The cause was cancer, her family said.
At her death, Ms. Middlebrook was emeritus professor of English at Stanford University, where she had taught since the 1960s. Her other biographies were a joint life of Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, and the story of the cross-dressing jazz musician Billy Tipton.
Published by Houghton Mifflin in 1991, Ms. Middlebrook’s book “Anne Sexton: A Biography” was a finalist for the National Book Award. It chronicled the short, turbulent life of its subject, who committed suicide at 45 in 1974. In the course of her reporting for the book, Ms. Middlebrook was given hundreds of hours of audiotapes of Ms. Sexton’s sessions with one of her psychiatrists.
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The cause was cancer, her family said.
At her death, Ms. Middlebrook was emeritus professor of English at Stanford University, where she had taught since the 1960s. Her other biographies were a joint life of Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, and the story of the cross-dressing jazz musician Billy Tipton.
Published by Houghton Mifflin in 1991, Ms. Middlebrook’s book “Anne Sexton: A Biography” was a finalist for the National Book Award. It chronicled the short, turbulent life of its subject, who committed suicide at 45 in 1974. In the course of her reporting for the book, Ms. Middlebrook was given hundreds of hours of audiotapes of Ms. Sexton’s sessions with one of her psychiatrists.