Savage Beauty (104 page)

Authors: Nancy Milford

16.
“that last time”: NM, interview with author, Aug. 25, 1975.

17.
“It’s time I stopped”: ESVM to Mary Herron,
Ls.
, p. 366.

18.
“When once I have”: ESVM to Margaret Cuthbert.
Ls.
, p. 376.

19.
“It was going”: ESVM to Cass Canfield.
Ls.
, p. 374.

20.
“Hard, hard it is”: Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Thanksgiving … 1950,”
The Saturday Evening Post
, November 1950, p. 31.

21.
“As soon as”: ESVM to Tess Adams.
Ls.
, p. 373.

22.
“No, my dear”: ESVM to Tess Adams, Oct. 9, 1950.
Ls.
, p. 376.

23.
“This iron is set”: ESVM to Lena Reusch.
Ls.
, p. 376.

24.
“I found her”: Dr. Oscar Wilcox, Jr., to author, Dec. 20, 1974. Dr. Wilcox signed the county coroner’s death certificate saying the cause of her death was “coronary occlusion.” But when he was asked why he’d written that, he simply denied it. “I do not know why she fell. The cause of death which I certified was fracture of cervical spine as a result of a fall down stairs.… She did not have a ‘stroke’ or any evidence of heart attack.” Dr. Oscar Wilcox, Jr., to author, April 21, 1975.

Quotes from Arthur D. Ficke are from the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use both published and unpublished materials:

Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry:
Two letters from Witter Bynner to Edna St. Vincent Millay dated December 1921 or January 1922 and January 19, 1922. Permission is granted by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC:
Excerpts from
Letters on Literature and Politics
, by Edmund Wilson, edited by Elena Wilson: copyright © 1977 by Elena Wilson. Excerpts from
The Shores of Light
, by Edmund Wilson: copyright © 1952 by Edmund Wilson, copyright renewed © 1980 by Helen Miranda Wilson. Excerpts from
The Twenties
, by Edmund Wilson: copyright © 1975 by Elena Wilson. Selections from the unpublished diaries and letters of Edmund Wilson: copyright © 2001 by Helen Miranda Wilson. Reprinted by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

HarperCollins Publishers:
Excerpts from
The Indigo Bunting: A Memoir of Edna St. Vincent Millay
, by Vincent Sheean. Copyright © 1951 by Vincent Sheean. Copyright renewed © 1979 by Diana Sheean. Copyright © 1951 by Norma Millay Ellis. Copyright renewed © 1979 by Norma Millay Ellis. Copyright © 1917, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1928, 1929, 1931, 1934, 1949 by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Used by permission.

Bel Kaufman:
Excerpt from a letter dated January 15, 1939, from Bel Goldstine to Edna St. Vincent Millay. Permission is granted by Bel Kaufman, the author of the perennial bestseller
Up the Down Staircase
.

The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society:
Photographs and quotes from poems, letters, diary entries, and other published and unpublished material by Edna St. Vincent Millay and her family. All rights, including copyright, to this material are owned by The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, Austerlitz, New York, 12017, and the materials are used here by permission.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation:
Letter from Georgia O’Keeffe to Edna St. Vincent Millay. Copyright © 1989 by The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. Used by permission.

Nan Sherman Sussman:
“Woman Without Fear” and “She Sleeps,” from
The Flowering Stone
, by George Dillon (copyright © 1931 by George Dillon; copyright renewed © 1959 by George Dillon), and excerpts from an unpublished poem by George Dillon and various letters by George Dillon. Used courtesy of Nan Sherman Sussman.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N
ANCY
M
ILFORD’S
Zelda
, a number one
New York Times
bestseller, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and was translated into twelve languages. Milford was an Annenberg Fellow at Brown University in 1995 and a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey in 1999. She has taught at the University of Michigan and at Vassar College, and she will be in the American Studies Program at Princeton University in the fall of 2001. She is a founder of the Writers Room, has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Literary Lion at The New York Public Library. She lives in New York.

Table of Contents

Other Books by This Author

Book One - The Lyric Years 1892–1923