Savage beauty : the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay / Nancy Milford.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Milford, Nancy.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 1892-1950.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent.

Poets, American--20th century--Biography.

Poets, American.

Women and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

United States.

History.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xviii, 550 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Random House, [2001]

Summary:

Thirty Years after the smashing success of Zelda, a national phenomenon that sold over 1.4 million copies and pioneered the study of women's lives, Nancy Milford returns with a stunning second act. Savage Beauty is her long-awaited portrait of a passionate, fearless woman who obsessed America even as she tormented herself.

If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as audacious in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. She embodied, in her reckless fancy, the spirit of the New Woman, and gave America its voice.

Milford calls her book "a family romance" -- for the love between the Millay sisters and their mother was so deep as to be dangerous. The three sisters competed for success with men, and later with their poetry. Their mother loved them with the controlling fierceness of a tyrant. "Theirs was a story of triumph over adversity," Milford writes, "one of the best women's stories there is in America -- hopeful, enduring, centered in family, and fraudulent."

The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Millay was dazzling in the performance of her self. Her voice was an instrument of seduction, and her impact on crowds, and on men, was legendary. Young women styled themselves in her image -- fairylike, taunting, free. Yet beneath her studied act, all was not well.

Millay's public affairs make for compulsive reading, but what this book reveals for the first time is her extraordinary private life. Written with the riveting intensity of an intimate drama, Savage Beauty is the first book to explore the dark side of Millay's life, her self-destructive passion and harrowing descent into morphine addiction.

Nancy Milford was given exclusive access to Millay's papers, and what she found was an unimaginable treasure. Hundreds of letters flew back and forth between the three sisters and their mother -- and Millay kept the most intimate diary, one whose ruthless honesty brings to mind the journals of Sylvia Plath. A triumphant accomplishment, a landmark in American literary history, Savage Beauty is an iconic portrait of a woman's life.

Contents:

Book 1 The Lyric Years: 1892-1923 1

1 This Double Life 3

2 The Escape Artist 87

3 Greenwich Village: Bohemia 143

4 "Paris Is Where the 20th Century Was" 203

Book 2 Steepletop: 1923-1950 245

5 Love and Fame 247

6 Love and Death 301

7 The Girl Poet 329

8 The Great Tours 383

9 Addiction 433

10 The Dying Fall 465.

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

039457589X