Nick Hughes, Sylvia Plath's son

FAIRBANKS, Alaska - Nicholas Hughes, the son of poet Sylvia Plath, has killed himself, 46 years after his mother committed suicide and almost 40 years to the day after his stepmother Assia Wevill did the same. He was 47.

Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself at his home March 16, Alaska State Troopers said. An evolutionary biologist, he spent more than a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Nicholas Hughes was only 9 months old when his parents, Plath and poet Ted Hughes, separated, and still an infant when his mother died in 1963. She had written of Nicholas: "You are the one/Solid the spaces lean on, envious/You are the baby in the barn." *

-Associated Press