Edna St. Vincent Millay

(1892 - 1950)

Told her hands were too small for her to become a concert pianist, Edna St. Vincent Millay turned instead to writing. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 and later embarked on reading tours across the United States. During World War II she wrote propaganda verse on assignment for the Writers’ War Board. “It was not as a craftsman nor as an influence,” wrote the poet John Ciardi after her death, “but as the creator of her own legend that she was most alive for us.”