Diane Middlebrook
| Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, a Marriage by Diane Middlebrook | |
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| Born | Diane Helen Wood 16 April 1939 Pocatello, Idaho, United States |
| Died | 15 December 2007 (age 68) San Francisco, California, United States |
| Occupation | university professor, author, poet |
| Genre | Biography |
| Notable works |
Anne Sexton, A Biography (1991) Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (1998) Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, a Marriage (2003) |
Diane Helen Wood Middlebrook (April 16, 1939 – December 15, 2007) was an American biographer, poet, and teacher. She taught feminist studies for many years at Stanford University. She is best known for critically acclaimed biographies of poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath (along with Plath's husband Ted Hughes), and jazz musician Billy Tipton. Middlebrook was preparing a biography of the Roman poet Ovid, to be published in 2008. Her death brought that project to a close.
Middlebrook held no illusions about the difficulties facing a biographer. In an interview on her professional life, she said: "With a biography there is no straight line; all is muddled. You don't know what you know, you don't know what you don't know; if you find anything you make a note about it because some day it may find its partner. You have to have very good ways of keeping track of what you have found and where you have put it."
Middlebrook was born Diane Helen Wood, in Pocatello, Idaho, the oldest of three daughters, born to teenage parents. In 1945, the family moved to Spokane, Washington.
Middlebrook expressed her desire to become a published poet and writer, but was not encouraged by her family. She paid her own way through college. She entered Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, then transferred to the University of Washington in Seattle. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1961. She entered Stanford University as an assistant professor of English in 1966, then obtained a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1968. Her doctoral dissertation was a combined study of American poet Wallace Stevens and American poet/philosopher/essayist Walt Whitman; her doctoral advisor was the noted American writer and literary critic Harold Bloom.
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