Central to Sexton's themes are the exasperating self-study, frank admissions of personal fault, and death urges that lace the writings of her idols, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Sylvia Plath. Sexton's initial collections — To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), nominated for a National Book Award and winner of the Helen Haire Levinson Prize — preceded a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, nomination for a National Book Award, and multiple invitations for readings. In the wake of a European tour and publication of the children's books Eggs of Things (1963) and More Eggs of Things (1964), coauthored with Maxine Kumin, and Selected Poems (1964), Sexton achieved a Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966), containing personal and aesthetic ponderings over unresolved grief.
During a three-year reprieve from suicidal fantasies, Sexton pursued mature, darkly humorous verse in Poems by Thomas Kinsella, Douglas Livingstone and Anne Sexton (1968) and Love Songs (1969) and saw the production of a play, Mercy Street (1963). While teaching at Boston University and Colgate, she exposed social fraud by restating Grimm's fairy tales in Transformations (1971) and issued a third children's title, Joey and the Birthday Present (1971), also coauthored by Kumin. Newly turned to interest in religion, she wrote The Book of Folly (1972), filled with themes of antiwoman violence, incest, abortion, drug addiction, neurosis, and insanity.
