A Voice of Her Generation

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
"Renascence,"
Pencil holograph of the unfinished
original draft, ca. 1912
Manuscript Division

Edna St. Vincent Millay dominated the American literary scene for the first half of this century. Her publication of "Renascence" in 1912 as a Vassar undergraduate gained her instant recognition. Between 1915 and 1920 she became a celebrity in bohemian Greenwich Village and by 1920 was known as the voice of her generation--full of freshness, gaiety, and implied rebellion. Though her style remained largely traditional, romantic, and lyrical, her free spirit spoke for modernism in the arts during the Jazz Age. In 1923 her third volume of poetry won the first Pulitzer Prize attained by a woman poet.