4.47 avg rating — 19 ratings

"Savage Beauty introduced a lot of us to Floyd Dell, a writer and critic and also Edna St. Vincent Millay's first lover in Bohemian Greenwich Village (1917). His fame dwindled in the 1930's following the banning of two of his books. As Millay’s good friend until her death, he protected her reputation and did not reveal intimate details about their relationship. But in the 1960s one of Millay's biographers, Miriam Gurko, requested those details, and they struck up a correspondence. Dell wrote more than a thousand pages about Millay as a poet, friend, and lover; he also wrote about their artist-compatriots in the early bohemian Greenwich Village. These letters and other memoirs collected dust until Floyd’s granddaughter, Jerri Dell, discovered them in the archives of The Newberry Library of Chicago. The letters alone numbered more than a thousand hand-written pages. She put together a volume of his letters and memoir about Millay, called Blood Too Bright: Floyd Dell Remembers Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s out March 1, 2017.
tags: 1920s, edna-st-vincent-millay, feminism, poetry, poets"