Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet, playwright, and Broadway performer born on February 22, 1892, in Rockland, Maine, and died on October 19, 1950. Her parents were Cora Lounella Buzelle, a custom hair stylist and training nurse, and Henry Tolman Millay, a life insurance agent, teacher, and later school superintendent. Her middle name came from St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City, where her uncle had survived an accident at sea shortly before her birth. In 1904, her mother divorced her father on grounds of improvidence and domestic abuse, after which Cora raised Edna and her two sisters, Norma Lounella and Kathleen Kalloch, moving between towns in poverty. The family eventually settled in Camden, Maine, in a house on the property of Cora's aunt, where Millay began writing the poems that would establish her literary reputation.

Millay showed early literary promise, winning the St. Nicholas Gold Badge for poetry at age fourteen and publishing work in St. Nicholas magazine, the Camden Herald, and the anthology Current Literature by age fifteen. At Camden High School she contributed to the school's literary magazine, The Megunticook. Her wider recognition began in 1912 when she entered the poem "Renascence" in a contest run by The Lyric Year. The contest's backer, Ferdinand P. Earle, initially selected Millay as the winner, but the other judges, who had separately agreed the winning poem must demonstrate social relevance, placed her fourth. The resulting controversy in newspaper columns and editorial pages helped launch her career. Following the contest, arts patron Caroline B. Dow heard Millay reciting poetry and playing piano at the Whitehall Inn in Camden and offered to fund her education at Vassar College.

Millay entered Vassar in 1913 at age twenty-one. She became a regular contributor to The Vassar Miscellany and maintained several romantic relationships with fellow students during her time there, including one with Edith Wynne Matthison, who later became a silent film actress. At the end of her senior year in 1917, the faculty voted to suspend her, but following a petition from her peers she was permitted to graduate. After leaving Vassar, Millay moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where she lived at several addresses, including a house connected to the Cherry Lane Theatre and 75½ Bedford Street, known as the narrowest house in New York City.

In Greenwich Village, Millay worked with the Provincetown Players on Macdougal Street and the Theatre Guild while building her career as a poet. Her Broadway work included appearances in and writing credits for Aria da Capo, Conversation at Midnight, and The Bonds of Interest, with her Broadway activity documented as early as 1919. That year she wrote the anti-war play Aria da Capo, which was staged at the Provincetown Playhouse and starred her sister Norma Millay. In 1921, she wrote The Lamp and the Bell, a verse drama, at the request of Vassar's drama department. In 1923, Millay was among those who founded the Cherry Lane Theatre to support the staging of experimental drama. She also wrote prose under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd, and contributed short stories to Ainslee's Magazine to support herself during her years in the Village.

Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for her poem "Ballad of the Harp-Weaver," becoming the first woman and the second person overall to receive that award. In 1943, she received the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry, becoming the sixth recipient and the second woman to be so honored. During much of her lifetime she was considered a major literary figure; the critic Edmund Wilson described her as one of the only poets writing in English at the time to have achieved the stature of a great literary figure. Her 1920 collection A Few Figs From Thistles generated controversy for its treatment of female sexuality and feminism, and she conducted nationwide public poetry readings that drew large audiences. By the 1930s her critical reputation declined as modernist critics took issue with her use of traditional poetic forms, though the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1960s and 1970s renewed scholarly interest in her work.