Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: and other prose writings, by Sylvia Plath, is a collection of early prose stories, journalism and journal fragments exploring the themes of mental illness, creativity and gender, from one of the twentieth century's most idiosyncratic voices.

A collection that outlines the author's early preoccupation with issues of mental illness, creativity and femininity, all of which would become recurrent themes in her later work. It contains the thirteen stories together with five pieces of her journalism, as well as a further nine stories selected from the Indiana archive.

From her mid-teens Sylvia Plath wrote stories, at first easily and successfully, but then with increasing difficulty as the demands of her real vision complicated her growing ambition to make a career as a conventional storywriter.

When the first edition of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams appeared, Margaret Walters said of it in the Guardian, 'the book does offer . . . new insight into her development as a writer, suggesting how even her mistakes and dead ends contributed to the formation of an original and pathfinding talent'.

This second edition contains the thirteen stories included in the first edition together with five pieces of her journalism, as well as a few fragments from her journal; and a further nine stories selected from the Indiana archive.