Edna St. Vincent Millay - "Only Until This Cigarette Is Ended" One of my all time favorite poets is Edna St. Vincent Millay. Not only was she a badass Pulitzer Prize laureate who looked undeniably sexy in a pair of high-waisted trousers, she was also a prominent feminist and social activist who lived in Greenwich Village at the height of its fashionable Bohemian era. She was famous for her numerous short-lived affairs with people of all genders, something she was incredibly and quite bravely open about given the time period (Millay lived from 1892 to 1950). Her work inspired another of America's greatest female poets (and a fellow Pulitzer winner), Mary Oliver, who befriended Millay's sister and even lived in Millay's house for a while following her death. Nancy Milford, the author of Millay's biography, wrote, " Millay was the first American figure to rival the personal adulation, frenzy even, of Byron, where the poet in his person was the romantic ideal
It's really amazing to me that I never read Kurt Vonnegut before this summer. I knew who he was, of course, but never got around to reading any of his novels. Dark comedies, especially ones with strong anti-war themes, are totally my cup of tea. I grew up on M*A*S*H and one of my favorite books of all time is Catch 22. Vonnegut's two most famous novels, Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five definitely fit that genre. Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi-autobiographical account of a POW's experience in WWII. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, has a lot in common with Vonnegut himself, who also occasionally appears in the novel as a first-person narrator. Billy is captured by the Nazis and is taken to Dresden, where he survives the Allied fire-bombing that decimated the city (just like Vonnegut himself did in real life). The story-telling in Slaughterhouse-Five is very disjointed, jumping from all over the place in space and time (Billy Pilgrim is "unstuck in tim