She was the daughter of a single-mother raising three kids, and her father was basically nonexistent in her life. Obviously, no one will ever be the true expert of another human being, but I literally now want to make Millay my queen. I really felt like I came out of this book being a Millay expert. Since we’re talking about a major figure in poetry, I really appreciated that we often got a sprinkle of lines from the poems Millay wrote, especially as we followed the sequential timeline of writing the poems. Her attention to detail is immaculate, and the way she reconstructs the history of Edna is done in an elegant way. Milford had been requested to write this biography by the only surviving Millay sister at the time, who died before she even got her own copy, and I can see why she was requested. Millay was an American original-one of those rare characters, like Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway, whose lives were even more dramatic than their art. Thirty years after her landmark biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, Nancy Milford returns with an iconic portrait of this passionate, fearless woman who obsessed America even as she tormented herself.Ĭhosen by USA Today as one of the top ten books of the year, Savage Beauty is a triumph in the art of biography.

The most famous poet of the Jazz Age, Millay captivated the nation: She smoked in public, took many lovers (men and women, single and married), flouted convention sensationally, and became the embodiment of the New Woman. Thomas Hardy once said that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St.

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