The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath (1963)

Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel — about a talented young woman's mental breakdown during a New York magazine internship in the 1950s — is the definitive literary account of depression and the constraints placed on women's ambitions in the mid-20th century. Published under a pseudonym one month before Plath's suicide, it became one of the most read and discussed American novels in the feminist literary canon.