The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963). This autobiographical novel, a raw, eloquent articulation of a young woman’s nervous breakdown after a summer working at a New York fashion magazine, is especially unsettling because it was published after Plath’s suicide. Her alter ego, Esther Greenwood, is a girl’s Holden Caulfield, ripping away the phoniness of the suburbs, the city, and the doctors who would shock her back into submission. Ultimately, Esther rallies against a sterile world and finds a way to live. Plath did not.