Edna St. Vincent Millay

born February 22, 1892, died October 19, 1950

With her fourth book of verse, The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, Edna
St. Vincent Millay became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize
for poetry (1923). She wrote her first published poem at age fourteen.
A reading of her poem Renascence, written when she was nineteen, attracted
a patron (Caroline Dow) who sent Millay to Vassar College in New York.
Millay was both a critically acclaimed and extremely popular poet. 
In later life, she switched from writing lyrical sonnets about personal
topics to writing political and social poems. In 1927, she donated 
the proceeds from her poem "Justice Denied in Massachusetts"
to the defense of Sacco and Venzetti. Her works include Renascence and 
Other Poems (1917), A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), Second April (1921),
Eight Sonnets in American Poetry: A Miscellany (1922), the plays Aria 
da Capo (1917), Two Slatterns and a King (1921), and The Lamp 
and the Bell (1921).