Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

· Blackstone Publishing · Narrated by Bernadette Dunne
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24 hr 39 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

Savage Beauty is the portrait of a passionate, fearless woman who obsessed America even as she tormented herself.

If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as flamboyant in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Millay was dazzling in the performance of herself. Her voice was likened to an instrument of seduction, and her impact on crowds and on men was legendary. Yet beneath her studied act, all was not well.

Milford calls her book “a family romance"—for the love between the three Millay sisters and their mother was so deep as to be dangerous. As a family, they were like real-life Little Women, with a touch of Mommie Dearest.

Nancy Milford was given exclusive access to Millay’s papers, and what she found was an extraordinary treasure. Boxes and boxes of letters flew back and forth among the three sisters and their mother—and Millay kept the most intimate diary, one whose ruthless honesty brings to mind Sylvia Plath.

Written with passion and flair, Savage Beauty is an iconic portrait of a woman’s life.

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About the author

Nancy Milford is an American biographer best known for her book about Zelda Fitzgerald, Zelda, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and spent twenty-nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Her biography of Edna St. Vincent Millar, Savage Beauty, was also a New York Times bestseller. She graduated from the University of Michigan and holds both an MA and PhD from Columbia University. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Biography, and has served on the boards of the Author’s Guild, the Society of American Historians, and the Writers Room, of which she is a founder. She has also received visiting fellowships to Yale and Princeton Universities and been named a President’s Fellow at Columbia University. She has taught at the University of Michigan, Princeton University, Brown University, Vassar College, New York University, Bennington College, Briarcliff College, and Bard College. She joined the permanent faculty at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) as a distinguished lecturer. In 2008, she was named executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Bernadette Dunne is the winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Audie Award. She studied at the Royal National Theatre in London and the Studio Theater in Washington, DC, and has appeared at the Kennedy Center and off Broadway.

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