Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on February 22, 1892, in Rockland, Maine. Raised by an independent single mother who nurtured her love of literature and classical piano, Millay vaulted into the national literary spotlight at age nineteen with her astonishing philosophical poem Renascence (1912).

After graduating from Vassar College in 1917, Millay moved to Greenwich Village, New York City, becoming a charismatic figure in the American bohemian literary renaissance. In 1920, she published A Few Figs from Thistles, containing her celebrated quatrain: '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!'

In 1923, Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, becoming the first woman to receive the honor in poetry. A master of the traditional sonnet form, she injected classical meter with radical modern themes of female sexual autonomy, grief, pacifism, and social justice. She passed away on October 19, 1950, at her Steepletop farm in upstate New York.