Sylvia Plath�s Son Commits Suicide

Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath and Robert Hughes, hanged himself in his Alaska home on March 16.

The evolutionary biologist was unwed and had no children. He had recently left his position as a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

His older sister, poet Frieda Hughes, told the London Times he, "had been battling depression for some time.”

His suicide follows his mother's tragic suicide 46 years ago and nearly exactly 40 years after his stepmothers, Assia Wevill.

Many blamed Robert Hughes for his first wife’s, the famed Bell Jar author, for her suicide after the brief marriage between the two poets that resulted in the birth of Nicholas Hughes. And in a sad twist of fate, Robert Hughes second wife killed herself and their four-year-old daughter in March of 1969.