Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Fans of Zelda, Nancy Milford's groundbreaking (and bestselling) biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald's tortured wife and muse, have been waiting impatiently since 1970 for Milford's promised follow-up about poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). It's finally here, and they will not be disappointed. Milford's vivid narrative limns an electric personality with psychological acuity while capturing the freewheeling atmosphere of America in the turbulent years following World War I. After "Renascence" was published (when she was only 20) and she moved to Greenwich Village, Millay was the queen of bohemia, taking lovers with zest and voicing the reckless gaiety of a generation in her famous lyric, "My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends-- / It gives a lovely light." With her flame-red hair, milk-white skin, and a voice that thrilled audiences (making her poetry readings a welcome source of income), Millay was the archetypal "new woman": powerful, passionate, and not to be ignored. But Milford makes it clear that her first loyalty was to her mother and sisters, and her deepest commitment to her writing. This juicy chronicle has famous names aplenty--critic Edmund Wilson and Masses editor Floyd Dell were among the men devastated by her refusal to be faithful--and lots of dissipation: Millay drank heavily and became addicted to morphine. It also takes a perceptive look at how an artist draws material from her life and at the strategies she uses to protect the wellsprings of creativity. Brief passages interspersed throughout delineating Milford's interactions with Norma Millay, the poet's younger sister and literary executor, might have been self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing; instead they offer intriguing snapshots of the complex process by which biography is made. The resulting book is a tour de force, and wildly entertaining as well. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
Milford hit the New York Times bestseller list 30 years ago with her acclaimed biography of Zelda Fitzgerald; she now seems poised to do it again with this outstanding biography of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like Fitzgerald, Millay (1892-1950) was a Jazz Age phenomenon, causing a sensation wherever she went; lines from her brief poem, "First Fig" ("I burn my candle at both ends/ It will not last the night... ") would become the rallying cry of a generation. She was notorious for her sexual unconventionality and (as Edmund Wilson put it) "her intoxicating effect on people... of all ages and both sexes." How a lyric poet could have achieved such celebrity is the conundrum at the heart of Savage Beauty. Millay, as Milford depicts her, was a troubled genius who used her prodigious gift to propel herself out of rural poverty and into the center of her age. She carefully cultivated the reporters and patrons who took the "fragile girl-child" under their wing. But her delicate image masked a force of nature whose incendiary wit and insatiable ambition took the public by storm. Milford deftly links the lyric intensity of Millay's work with her ravenous appetite for life. Whether tracing her ghoulishly close relationship to her mother and sisters, her years at the center of cosmopolitan life or her morphine addiction and untimely death, this account offers its readers a haunting drama of artistic fame. A true paradigm of literary biography, this finely crafted book is not to be missed. (Sept. 11) Forecast: Zelda, a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, sold 1.4 million copies. In addition to a nine-city author tour and first serial publication in Vanity Fair, Mitford will be interviewed in the September issue of Harper's Bazaar. Expect lots of excellent reviews and return trips to the printer once the 75,000 initial run sells out. Along with this bio, Modern Library will issue a new edition of Millay's poetry, edited byCopyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In 1923, Edna St.Vincent Millay (1892-1950) became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for POETRY. To write her biography, Milford whose one other major publication is a highly praised and best-selling biography, Zelda persuaded Millay's younger sister and sole heir, Norma, to give her access to hundreds of Millay's personal papers, letters, and notebooks. Selecting from "this extraordinary collection," Milford meticulously integrates Millay's major poems, letters received and sent, reactions of friends, and comments from extensive interviews with Norma into an orderly and affecting narrative. The result is an intimate look at a complex, charismatic, imperfect woman, someone who evokes both admiration and sympathy. Among the less glamorous revelations are the sometimes damaging intertwining of the poet's life with that of her mother and two sisters, Millay's promiscuity and uncanny seductiveness, and the dynamics of her 27-year marriage to a man who adored and promoted her while enabling her infidelities and addictions. Milford's lengthy portrait is a testimonial to her scholarship, stamina, and commitment to her craft. This should serve as a model of a highly readable biography, as well as a standard source for future Millay studies. Recommended for all libraries.- Carol A. McAllister, Coll. of William & Mary Lib., Williamsburg, VA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Millay scholars were frustrated for decades by the inaccessibility of a vast treasure trove of letters, journals, and other private papers jealously guarded by the poet's sister, Norma. Milford, the author of Zelda (1970), the best-selling biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, gradually earned Norma's trust during the 1970s and now presents the first comprehensive authorized biography of the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Red-headed, green-eyed, precocious, independent, and beguiling, Millay was born in Camden, Maine, in 1892, the eldest of three daughters of a divorced and renegade mother. Millay began writing as a girl, and her brilliant, original, and fearless early poems won her prizes and wealthy patrons who sent her to Vassar, where she conducted a great swirl of love affairs with young women and older men. Once established in Greenwich Village, the indefatigably lascivious Millay wrote daring yet lyric collections that sold in the tens of thousands at the height of the Depression. Milford is both meticulous and dynamic in her assessment of Millay's trailblazing work and complicated, controversial life right up to its sad and dramatic end, and she will continue her reclamation of a great American poet as editor of a forthcoming Modern Library edition of Millay's fire-and-diamond poetry. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"Nancy Milford has done it again. One seldom sees this level of brilliant, hands-on research in contemporary literary biography. The result is this compelling, keenly perceptive life of Edna St. Vincent Milay -- with its own 'savage beauty.'" -- Toni Morrison

"SAVAGE BEAUTY is irresistible, Nancy Milford gives us not only the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, but also her heart, her times, and the sparkling essence of her poetry."
-- Amanda Foreman

"Millay lives! And she casts a spell over the reader as mesmerizing as her poetry. Nancy Milford has done it again -- and ZELDA has met her equal."
-- Bill Moyers


Review
?An incendiary cocktail of literary ambition, fame, sexual adventure and addiction.?
?Newsweek

?Perfectly outstanding...Milford?s biography takes the whole of Millay?s heaving, grieving, ecstatic life into account in a way that is almost loving, always respectful, even when blunt truth and candor are necessary....Masterful.?
?Kaye Gibbons, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

?Original and spellbinding.?
?Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books

?Savage Beauty is irresistible.?
?Amanda Foreman

?One seldom sees this level of brilliant, hands-on research in contemporary literary biography. The result is this compelling, keenly perceptive life of Edna St. Vincent Millay?with its own ?savage beauty.??
?Toni Morrison

?Riveting and revealing...Savage Beauty sweeps before it all previous biographies of Millay, which by contrast seem uninformed and too discreet.?
?J. D. McClatchy, The New York Times Book Review


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After 30 years, Milford (Zelda) returns with another definitive biography of another significant literary figure. The author's prologue describes her intricate choreography with Norma Millay, sister of the poet Edna and possessor of the thousands of documents and other materials Milford eventually came to possess. Throughout, she quotes passages of her conversations with Norma-dialogue so pregnant and peculiar it could have come from The Aspern Papers. In the early chapters, Milford slips back and forth in time to tell the stories of Edna's ancestors and to describe a childhood featuring eccentric and impecunious parents (when the Millays' Maine house flooded one winter, the three sisters ice-skated on the kitchen floor). The poet's mother, Cora, is a character from a Tennessee Williams play-fiercely devoted to her children, a woman who both competed with her talented daughters and gave them their supreme self-confidence. Edna (who first published as "Vincent Millay"-the "St. Vincent" derived from the name of a hospital that had saved an uncle) displayed an early felicity with verse and began publishing in her teens. When she entered Vassar in 1913, she was already a minor celebrity. In college-and throughout much of her life-Edna was a bohemian who smoked, drank, swam nude, and enjoyed sex with both women and men. (Milford does not neglect to give us a paragraph about Millay's discovery of her clitoris and a passage about her pubic hair.) She became an extraordinarily popular poet, selling tens of thousands of copies of her collections, delivering readings in her rich, mellifluous, contralto voice to standing-room-only crowds all over the country. In 1950, however, her elfinbeauty destroyed by age, alcohol, drugs, pain, and sorrow, Millay-either accidentally or intentionally (Milford does not speculate)-tumbled down a dark stairway and broke her neck. An essential biography of a unique and important poet-written with lush detail and delicious language, and displaying enormous care, craft, and compassion.


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