This Week in Literary History: Edna St. Vincent Millay Loses Her Manuscript in a Hotel Fire

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On May 2, 1936, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay—the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, in 1923—arrived at her hotel on a vacation to Sanibel Island, Florida. She had naturally brought her manuscript-in-progress, titled Conversation at Midnight, along with her. It was almost nightfall, and so Milay had her luggage sent up to her room and went down to the beach with her husband Eugen, to look for shells. When she turned back, she saw that her hotel was in flames.

“It was a major tragedy,” Eugen wrote to Norma, Millay’s sister.

The terrible thing is, that Edna lost the entire Mss. of her new book, which was going to the printer in June.—And the Mss. of practically another book.—I hope she will be able to remember many of them. But the whole thing has shaken her up quite a bit, and she does not seem to wish to start trying to remember them…but with her vitality and courage, she’ll get over it, bye and bye, and be once more interested in her work.—Poor Kid.

She also lost a seventeenth-century copy of Catullus, which she said, according to biographer Nancy Mitford, was “the only thing that touched me emotionally, the only thing I mourned for.”

Despite this statement, she struggled emotionally with the fact that her manuscript had been destroyed, Mitford writes—and yet somehow, over the next months, she was able to rewrite it, entirely from memory. It was published the next year.