On August 24^th, 1953, Sylvia Plath, Age 20, crawled into the basement of her house, ingested a lethal dosage of sleeping pills, and waited to die. This marked her first suicide attempt, which she ultimately survived, but it would not be her last. She continued to attempt suicide multiple times over the next ten years, until finally succeeding on February 11, 1963, in London. Five years later, and four thousand miles away, a sanitation worker’s strike brought Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis. After one failed assassination attempt, another succeeded in ending Dr. King’s life on April 4, 1968. Two influential writers, separated by only a few years and a short distance, both had very intimate experiences with death. In fact, they both knew that they were going to die before they actually did. However, even though they were similarly aware of their upcoming demise, their respective approaches toward death were drastically different. Compared to Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech “I’ve been to the Mountaintop”, “I am Vertical” by Sylvia Plath seems like a more nihilistic and depressing view of the world, which highlights how people view the ongoing struggle of life in different ways.