But her success was followed two years later by more hospitalization for depression, returning to Westwood Lodge. That November however, she was awarded the Levinson Prize for poetry. Her book entitled All My Pretty Ones was nominated for the National Book Award. She was awarded the Ford Foundation grant for residence with the Charles Playhouse in Boston. By the end of the year she was touring Europe on the first Traveling Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. .
Selected Poems was published in England in 1964, ad her life seemed to be renewed. She toured Europe with her husband, moved into a new home, and began seeing a new psychiatrist. Following in 1965 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was given the first literary magazine travel award from the International Congress of Cultural Freedom. Yet shortly thereafter Sexton attempted suicide again after beginning a novel to be left unfinished. One month later she and her husband went on an African safari. In 1967 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die. She toured England in July of 1967and read at the International Poetry Festival in London. .
Sexton's life waxed and waned over the course of the next six years. At a high point, she received an honorary Phi Beta Kappa award from Harvard in 1968. Climbing higher in 1969, she served as editorial consultant to the New York Poetry Quarterly, and was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship that April. In 1969 she received an honorary Phi Beta Kappa award from Radcliffe University. This success continued with her teaching career at Boston University, her work at the American Place Theatre in New York, and conducting workshops in her home for Oberlin College Independent Study students. Then, in 1970 she served on the board of directors of Audience magazine, and was made honorary Doctor of Letters at Tufts University. Yet, it is possible that her success was too much because all of this was followed by another suicide attempt later in 1970.
