Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work. The poet Richard Wilbur asserted, She wrote some of the best sonnets of the century.

Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, to Cora Lounella Buzelle, a nurse, and Henry Tolman Millay, a schoolteacher who would later become a superintendent of schools. Her middle name derives from St. Vincents Hospital in New York, where her uncles life had been saved just before her birth. The familys house was between the mountains and the sea where baskets of apples and drying herbs on the porch mingled their scents with those of the neighboring pine woods. In 1904, Cora officially divorced Millays father for financial irresponsibility, but they had already been separated for some years. Cora and her three daughters, Edna , Norma Lounella , and Kathleen Kalloch , moved from town to town, living in poverty. Cora travelled with a trunk full of classic literature, including Shakespeare and Milton, which she read to her children. The family settled in a small house on the property of Coras aunt in Camden, Maine, where Millay would write the first of the poems that would bring her literary f

Source: Wikipedia