Contributors and Acknowledgements

Contributors

Ronald Patkus is Associate Director of the Libraries for Special Collections and Adjunct Associate Professor of History, Vassar College.

Holly Peppe is Literary Executor for Edna St. Vincent Millay. While writing her dissertation about Millay’s sonnets and critical reception, she became friends with the poet’s sister, Norma Millay Ellis, and lived with her at Steepletop in the years before her death in 1986, at age 92. Dr. Peppe’s critical essays appear in Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal (Southern Illinois University Press, 1995); Millay’s Early Poems (Penguin Classics, 1998); Collected Poems (Harper Perennial, 2011); and Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay: An Annotated Edition (Yale University Press, 2016).

Thomas Hill is Art Librarian, Vassar College. He holds a PhD from Columbia University in English and comparative literature, and is author of She,This in Blak: Vision, Truth, and Will in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus & Criseyde (Routledge, 2006).

Acknowledgements

All the items in the exhibition at Vassar College are on loan from Millay’s home at Steepletop in Austerlitz, NY, which is owned and maintained by the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society. For more information, please see millay.org. The photographs in this publication are also from the Society and the Library of Congress, where a large Millay Collection is housed. Special thanks to Millay Society Vice President Mark O’Berski for curating the exhibition and other members of the Millay Society Board-Vincent Barnett, President; Megan Ainsworth; Krystyna Poray Goddu; and Anina Rossen for their support.

The 16 mm film footage of Edna St. Vincent Millay was taken by composer Deems Taylor, with whom Millay collaborated as librettist on the first American opera commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, The King’s Henchman, which opened at the Met in 1927 to rave reviews. Also recognizable are Millay’s husband Eugen Boissevain; Taylor’s wife, actress/poet Mary Kennedy; and Millay and Eugen’s friends, Arthur and Gladys Ficke. Use of the footage, accompanied by Taylor’s original music, was granted courtesy of Michael Cook, Deems Taylor’s grandson.

-Ron Patkus