From PRX.

I'm Kurt Anderson, and this is the Studio 360 podcast.

Studio 360's American icon series has deeply examined dozens of important and influential works of literature,

music, film, architecture, design, and all kinds of visual art, such as the Disney theme

parks and the autobiography of Malcolm X and 2001 A Space Odyssey. These are the works of art

and entertainment that have shaped who we are

and how we see ourselves as Americans. Now Studio 360 is turning to our hometown, New York City,

for a new batch of icon stories. The stories about works of art that took shape in the city,

but that have shaped the minds of people

everywhere. The bell jar by Sylvia Plath is set mainly in New York City, but it's not always

thought of as a New York novel like Catcher in the Rye or The Age of Innocence are.

That's probably because what's autobiographical about the novel tends to

eclipse other aspect of it. Just a month after the bell jar was first published in 1963, Plath killed

herself. Since the book is pretty autobiographical and its narrator attempts suicide, it can be hard

not to read it as a sort of literary suicide note.

But of course, there's a lot more to the novel.

It's about a young woman from the Boston suburbs who, like Plath, lands a plum internship,

guest editing, a women's magazine in New York in the summer of 1953.

And it does a lot to capture what did and still does go along with trying to make it in New York,

all the outsized possibilities and outsized disappointments.

On this edition of New York icons, producer Benish Ahmed has the story of the bell jar.

I first read the bell jar when I was 16 and bored in Ohio, dreaming of being a writer

...