Sylvia Plath's son Nicholas Hughes committed suicide March 16, his sister Frieda announced in a statement Sunday. Nicholas had been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, but had left to pursue pottery at home. His mother killed herself on Feb, 11, 1963, when Nicholas was just past his first birthday; he was 47 at his death. He had long suffered from depression.
Plath's husband, the poet Ted Hughes, was often the center of controversy over Plath's literary legacy. After her death he made sure "Ariel," containing some of her greatest poems, was published; but he also destroyed her last journal, frustrating both fans and scholars. "I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it," he wrote in 1982, adding, "(in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)."
The effort to nurture forgetfulness would be incomplete. In a 1998 Salon piece, author Kate Moses -- who imagined Sylvia Plath in her novel "Wintering" -- wrote:
Plath's suicide note was found pinned to their perambulator. In addition to the sickening ricochet of emotions anyone in his position would have felt, Hughes was left in a seemingly untenable predicament: He would have to serve masters with dramatically opposing needs -- Plath's literary estate, his vulnerable children and, as he put it years later in a letter to Plath biographer Anne Stevenson, "my simple wish to recapture for myself, if I can, the privacy of my own feelings and conclusions about Sylvia, and to remove them from contamination by anybody else's."
In a letter quoted in that Salon article, Hughes wrote to A. Alvarez of his frustration of the outlining the details of Plath's death, which he didn't want their children to know: "now you have defined the whole thing, and handed it to the public. In a real way, you have robbed them of her death, of any natural way of dealing with her death. This will add up through every year they live."
Did it? Some would say not. A family friend told the Times of London, "Nick wasn’t just the baby son of Plath and Hughes and it would be wrong to think of him as some kind of inevitably tragic figure. He was a man who reached his mid-forties, an adventurous marine biologist with a distinguished academic career behind him and a host of friends and achievements in his own right. That is the man who is mourned by those who knew him."
-- Carolyn Kellogg
The son of poets  and  has committed suicide.

 hanged himself at his home in , Alaska on March 16, after a long battle with . Hughes was 47 at the time of his death.

Media outlets described the death as another in a long line of tragedy for the family.

Hughes was only one year old when his mother famously gassed herself to death in 1963, soon after her relationship with Ted Hughes ended. In 1969, Ted Hughes' mistress killed herself and their daughter in a copycat suicide.

The grave of poet , the mother of Nicholas Hughes who committed suicide on March 16.Nicholas Hughes, who was not married and had no children, was an  who studied stream fish. He had been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the  until recently, when he he left the post to set up a  at home.

“His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world)," his sister, Frieda Hughes, said in a statement given to the press.

"He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan," she said.

Near the end of her life, Sylvia Plath wrote poems about Nicholas Hughes, including one entitled "Nick and the Candlestick" from her collection, '''', which reads: “You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn.”