Who will enjoy reading Savage Beauty, the passionate biography of poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay? Just about anybody who remembers the poet’s name from high school English class. Readers will be shocked and fascinated to learn of Millay’s complex, controversial life. Biographer Nancy Milford, who wrote the million-selling Zelda, gained exclusive access to the thousands of papers that belong to Millay’s estate and spent 30 years compiling the details into the compassionate, resonant portrait that is Savage Beauty. Born into extreme poverty and virtually deserted by both parents, the brilliant young Millay was sponsored at Vassar by a wealthy matron. At college, the misbehaving, promiscuously bisexual young seductress (friends called her Vincent) became a nationally acclaimed poet. By age 28, she had published 77 poems over a three-year span, all the while conducting casual affairs with many of her editors. Millay’s intense friendships with famous people, her sold-out poetry performances, her rock star fame (her collection Fatal Interview sold 33,000 copies in 10 weeks during the height of the Depression) make this biography a compelling one. In 1923, she married Eugen Boissevain, an aristocratic Dutchman. Though the famous Millay strove for a quieter image, privately, she and Boissevain had an open marriage. She wrote best when fueled by infatuation and began an intense affair, a liaison Boissevain attempted to turn into a menage `a trois.

The first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, in the end, Millay succumbed to years of illness and gin and morphine. She died in 1949 of a broken neck from a fall down a flight of stairs at Steepletop, her beloved home. A new volume of her verse from the Modern Library, edited by Milford, quotes the poet on the timeless appeal of her own work. I think people like my poetry because it is mostly about things that anybody has experienced, she says. You can just sit in your farmhouse, or your home anywhere, and read it and know you’ve felt the same thing yourself. Who will enjoy reading this tragic, engrossing biography? The simpler question is, who won’t?

Mary Carol Moran is the author of Clear Soul: Metaphors and Meditations, (Court Street Press). She teaches the Novel Writers’ Workshop at Auburn University.

When Hubert H. McAlexander, a professor at the University of Georgia, first told Peter Taylor he wanted to be his biographer, Taylor replied, Oh, no, I haven’t had a very interesting life. But Taylor, a 20th century master of the short story and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, in fact had many fascinating stories to tell.

As McAlexander relates in Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life, Taylor (1917-1994) was personally engaging, a keen observer of humankind who was devoted to his art. The future author was born in Trenton, a small town in western Tennessee, where his father was an attorney and politician. Soon the family moved to the city first to Nashville, then to St. Louis and Memphis. Early on, Peter developed a strong historical consciousness and literary bent. After studying at Southwestern (now Rhodes College) and Vanderbilt, he went to Kenyon College because John Crowe Ransom, a professor, poet, critic and founder of the Kenyon Review, was there. Ransom was primarily interested in poetry, and years later Taylor acknowledged that Ransom’s teaching him so much about the compression of poetry was what led him to be a short story writer rather than a novelist. At Kenyon, he developed life-long friendships with Robert Lowell, his roommate, and Randall Jarrell, who would later be a teaching colleague in North Carolina. Taylor is often referred to as a Southern or regional author. In that regard, it is interesting to follow his development as a writer and as a teacher of writing not only in the South, but also at Ohio State, Kenyon and Harvard. About his own fiction Taylor once wrote, In my stories, politics and sociology are only incidental, often only accidental. I make the same use of them that I do of customs, manners, household furnishings, or anything else that is part of our culture. But the business of discovery of the real identity of the images that present themselves is the most important thing about writing fiction. Ultimately it is the discovery of what life is all about. Anyone interested in 20th century literary history will find McAlexander’s book an absorbing work. His beautifully rendered biography should inspire readers to read or reread Taylor’s elegantly executed fiction.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.