Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on February 22, 1892 in Rockland, Maine. Her mother Cora divorced her father at the turn of the century for being fiscally undependable and raised Millay and her two sisters in Camden, Maine. Cora taught her daughters to have an appreciation for music and literature, as well as independence and confidence within themselves. Millay began writing at a young age and served on her high school’s newspaper as both a writer and an editor. Her poetry was published in several local magazines, but her poem “Renascence” brought her the widest esteem up to that point after its inclusion in an anthology called The Lyric Year (1912). It also earned her a scholarship to Vassar College in upstate New York.

            While studying at Vassar from 1913 to 1917, Millay involved herself in theatre and began to write plays in addition to her poetry. She matured into a bold feminist and on occasion entered into romantic relationships with other women. She graduated from … [Millay won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her collection The Harp Weaver] …Vassar in 1917 and that same year published her first collection of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems. She moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village, living an avant-garde life among other writers and actors. She earned little money as a writer but continued to submit articles, poetry, and short stories to magazines that published some of them. Millay also joined the Provincetown Players, an acting troupe for whom she wrote and directed plays. In 1920, she published her second poetry collection, A Few Figs from Thistles, a controversial volume because of its brazen sexual and feminist content. Millay then toured Europe for three years after the collection’s publication and an agreement to write for Vanity Fair. Her position at the magazine did not monopolize her time; Millay continued writing plays and poetry and published her third collection Second April in 1921.

Her fourth volume, however, earned her the greatest awards. Millay won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her collection The Harp Weaver, making her the first woman to receive that award for Poetry. That same year, the poet married Eugen Boissevain with whom she traveled the world to promote her writing. The two settled in rural New York and enjoyed a twenty-six-year notoriously sexually open marriage. Millay wrote the libretto to a successful American opera and briefly involved herself in politics, specifically the infamous Sacco-Vanzetti case, and harbored sympathy for communism and socialism. Her political drives were reflected in her poetry, most especially in Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939). The majority of her later poems, however, spoke of her ill-fated affairs, often with significantly younger men.

In 1944, Millay suffered a nervous breakdown which abruptly halted her writing for two years, and in caring for his wife, Boissevain also fell ill. He died in 1949 of lung cancer and a stroke. Millay died the following year on October 19, 1950, brought on by her alcoholism and desolate loneliness.