Nicholas Hughes | Plath's son, 47, a suicide

Nicholas Hughes, 47, the son of poet Sylvia Plath, killed himself at his Alaska home, 46 years after his mother committed suicide.

Mr. Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself March 16, Alaska state troopers said. An evolutionary biologist, he spent more than a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He left about a year ago, said Marmian Grimes, the school's senior public information officer.

Mr. Hughes' older sister, poet Frieda Hughes, issued a statement expressing her "profound sorrow" and saying he "had been battling depression for some time."

Mr. Hughes graduated from the University of Oxford in 1984 and earned a master of arts degree from Oxford in 1990, before emigrating to the United States and getting a doctorate from the University of Alaska.

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

Plath became a cult figure and feminist martyr through her novel, The Bell Jar, which told of a suicidal young woman, and through the "Ariel" poems.

The immediate cause of her marital breakup was Ted Hughes' affair with Assia Wevill, and Plath's fame would long haunt her husband. He waited years to tell his children the full details of her suicide, and also relived it through the March 1969 suicide of Wevill, who killed their daughter, Shura, 4, before taking her own life. Ted Hughes died of cancer in 1998.

- Associated Press