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Savage Beauty
- The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 24 hrs and 39 mins
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Publisher's summary
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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Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- David P
- 04-29-22
Fascinating Woman
Edna St Vincent Millay was a fascinating woman of exceptional intelligence and talent. It's impossible to imagine a poet achieving her level of fame today. Her life was wildly interesting--from her poverty-stricken childhood to her intense relationship with her mother (a character worthy of her own biography) to her marriage and many affairs with men and women to, finally, her slide into alcoholism and addiction.
Milford's biography is detailed and unusual. She includes testy conversations she had with Millay's elderly sister, the gatekeeper of Millay's literary estate, and exhaustive records of Millay's own notes on her use of morphine. I was never bored, but I ended the book feeling as if Milford hadn't quite brought to life Millay's personality and psychology as she did with Zelda Fitzgerald. Especially in the book's second half, she seems to be assembling and printing up her massive research materials rather than interpreting them. The first half seems more fully digested.
Even so, I was VERY happy to have listened to this. I was captivated and haunted. I found the reader easy to listen to and appropriately expressive. (It would be odd to be too dramatic in reading a serious biography.)
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9 people found this helpful
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- Wendy Hill
- 11-21-22
Exquisitely revealing
A wonderful book read with great care and feeling. After listening to this book I feel I really know Edna St. Vincent Millay. I recommend it highly.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-11-22
Maine Author
I haven't been drawn into a story like this in so long. It saddens me that it's over.
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1 person found this helpful
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- robin210
- 06-26-22
Fascinating life
I have enjoyed Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry for many years, but knew little of her life. During her lifetime, however, it appears the reverse was true for her contemporary audience. The biography is an excellent portrait of a woman who lived by her own rules at a time when this was simply not done. Her story is ultimately tragic, as is true for so many artists. It is well written and researched. My only criticism is that it is too long.
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- Mary Panzer
- 02-14-23
A vivid story from another century
The author includes a lot of poetry in the text, so that you can understand how very beautiful Millay’s work continues to be. We also get substantial quotes from her correspondence, which funny, emotional, and sharp. It brings you close to the subject, as you can hear her own voice. Another component is the ongoing conversation between the author and Millay’s youngest sister, which bridges past and present. A very satisfying narrative.
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- Maryanne
- 04-17-22
Struggled
Struggled and on several occasions was going to return. Didn't find engaging and narrator was very mechanical inparts.
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- Hiro
- 04-11-22
Highly recommended
A splendid biography of my favourite poet. I initially thought a narration was a bit robotic, but, it gradually started to grow on me.
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Story
In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
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E. E. Cummings
- A Life
- By: Susan Cheever
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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E. E. Cummings' radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax resulted in his creation of a new, idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. And while there was critical disagreement about his work (Edmund Wilson called it "hideous", while Malcolm Cowley called him "unsurpassed in his field"), at the time of his death in 1962, at age 67, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States. Now, in this new biography, Susan Cheever traces the development of the poet and his work.
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Very engaging story of the life of e.e.cummings!
- By Kathi on 02-14-14
By: Susan Cheever
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The Paper Garden
- An Artist Begins Her Life's Work at 72
- By: Molly Peacock
- Narrated by: Jill Tanner
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Paper Garden, celebrated poet Molly Peacock explores the remarkable life of 18th-century British gentlewoman-turned-artist Mary Delany. In the 1770s, at the age of 72, the twice-widowed and nearly broke Delany turned her interest in botany into beautiful paper “mosaick” flowers still revered today.
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Loved it!
- By Diane Challenor on 10-25-12
By: Molly Peacock
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Square Haunting
- Five Writers in London Between the Wars
- By: Francesca Wade
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures - many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living - and, therefore, of being - these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.
By: Francesca Wade
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A Life of My Own
- A Memoir
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Penelope Wilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Marked by honesty, humility, and grace, rendered in the most elegant of prose, A Life of My Own is a portrait of a life, replete with joy and heartbreak. With quiet insight and unsparing clarity, Claire Tomalin writes autobiography at its most luminous, delivering an astonishing and emotionally taut masterpiece.
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Flat, name dropping with no insight
- By Mary on 01-01-19
By: Claire Tomalin
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Louisa May Alcott
- The Woman Behind Little Women
- By: Harriet Reisen
- Narrated by: Harriet Reisen
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the effect of her father's self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family's chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; and the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain.
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interesting life, strange reader
- By h and l on 01-10-10
By: Harriet Reisen
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Memoirs
- By: Tennessee Williams
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media - though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "a raw display of private life" by the New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed.
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Informative and fun
- By Gary on 12-10-20
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Shirley Jackson
- A Rather Haunted Life
- By: Ruth Franklin
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Known to millions mainly as the author of the "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense and psychological horror, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America more deeply than anyone. Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
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An incredible writer; a courageous woman
- By Lesley on 10-08-16
By: Ruth Franklin
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Nothing to Be Frightened Of
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A memoir on mortality as only Julian Barnes can write it, one that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.
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Brilliant
- By Mitzi on 09-01-23
By: Julian Barnes
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The Invisible Woman
- The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857; she was 18, a hard-working actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep, and he was 45, the most lionized writer in England. Out of their meeting came a love affair that lasted 13 years and destroyed Dickens's marriage while effacing Nelly Ternan from the public record.
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Interesting
- By Jean on 01-21-13
By: Claire Tomalin
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Secrets of the Flesh
- A Life of Colette
- By: Judith Thurman
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 25 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A scandalously talented stage performer, a practiced seductress of both men and women, and the flamboyant author of some of the greatest works of 20th-century literature, Colette was our first true superstar. Now, in Judith Thurman's Secrets of the Flesh, Colette at last has a biography worthy of her dazzling reputation.
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More than just a biography
- By Phip Herrick on 04-22-21
By: Judith Thurman
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Frida
- A Biography of Frida Kahlo
- By: Hayden Herrera
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Hailed by listeners and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences: her childhood near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children; her tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera and intermittent love affairs with men as diverse as Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky.