Savage Beauty

Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, is as riveting to read as a novel. Its central character is Vincent herself, a fiery, unstable and formidably gifted poet who spent her life trying to manipulate others while ultimately being controlled by those she wanted to dominate. A groundbreaker sexually and politically, Vincent represented a generation of women who wanted more from life than household drudgery, and her poetry titillated and outraged the country. Her sad later years, declining into drug and alcohol addiction, read as the tragedy they are, although Milford delicately steps away from assigning too much blame to any party. Would Vincent have become the poet she did if she had not had the help of so many people, and what would she have accomplished if her husband had not, as we call it today, co-dependently fed her addictions? Milford doesn't attempt to answer these questions, but this highly readable and fascinating literary biography shows how Vincent's life is far from obsolete.