Highly personal, confessional verse. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children.

Suffered from mental illness: manic disorder.

Anne Gray Harvey  was born in Newton, Massachusetts. She  married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen. She enrolled in a modeling course at the Hart Agency and lived in San Francisco and Baltimore. In 1953 she gave birth to a daughter. In 1954 she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, suffered her first mental breakdown, and was admitted to Westwood Lodge, a neuropsychiatric hospital she would repeatedly return to for help. In 1955, following the birth of her second daughter, Sexton suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized again; her children were sent to live with her husband`s parents. That same year, on her birthday, she attempted suicide.Encouraged by her doctor she enrolled in 1957 in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. There she became close friends with Maxine Kumin who was also enrolled there. 

Writing poetry gave Sexton soemthing to look forward to, the strenght to carry on a goal to work towards and helped her to go on for as long as she did.

Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. She made the experience of being a woman a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for Live or Die

In 1974 at the age of 46, she lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.