Diane Wood Middlebrook, 68, a poet, intellectual and feminist scholar whose biographies of poet Anne Sexton, novelist Sylvia Plath and jazz musician Billy Tipton drew attention for their revelations of gender-related creativity, died of cancer Saturday in San Francisco.
A Stanford University literature professor for 35 years, Middlebrook drew crowds for her poetry classes. Her transition from verse to biography began with a letter from an editor who wanted to know whether she wanted to meet the daughter of Anne Sexton.
Middlebrook, then the director of Stanford’s Center for Research on Women, agreed.
The meeting led to years of research and a windfall: Sexton’s psychiatrist gave her all 312 tapes of the poet’s psychotherapy sessions. The result was the best- selling “Anne Sexton: A Biography” (1991), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Its revelations of incest, as well as its use of therapy records, ensured controversy, though reviewers called it sympathetic, just, insightful and complex in its sympathies and in judgment.
In researching her next book, “Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton” (1998), about a female jazz musician who lived as a man, she found that Tipton fooled Duke Ellington and five wives, and “fathered” three children.
Her 2003 “Her Husband: Hughes and Plath — a Marriage,” examined the literary and romantic relationship of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. A fourth biography, of a Roman poet dead for 2,000 years, “Young Ovid,” is to be published next year.
She was born in Idaho and raised in Spokane, Wash., where before age 10 she had a poem published on a newspaper’s comics page and her grandmother gave her a library card, which set the direction of her life.
Julia Carson, 69, the first black and first woman to represent Indianapolis in Congress, died Saturday after a battle with lung cancer, spokeswoman Vanessa Summer said.
Carson had not been in Washington since September. She was first elected to Congress in 1996. She championed children’s issues, women’s rights and efforts to reduce homelessness and was an opponent of the war in Iraq.
Carson was born to a single mother who worked as a housekeeper. She began her political career in the 1960s when then-Rep. Andy Jacobs Jr. hired her to work in his office. Jacobs encouraged Carson to run for the Indiana Legislature in 1972. She ran for Congress in 1996 after Jacobs retired.
