DHCommons

When Edna St. Vincent Millay died in 1950, her sister Norma moved in to her home, called Steepletop, in Austerlitz, NY. Ever since 1950, Millay's personal library has remained relatively undisturbed. Over the years, one or two casual inventories of the books were made, but they are filled with errors, and they've never been published nor put into digital form. This project aims to create an accurate digital catalog of the library and to record as much as possible of the inscriptions and marginalia in the works. We're going to begin by creating a Zotero library with bibliographic data, attaching notes on inscriptions and marginalia. We'll then check this library against the books in the library at Steepletop. Eventually we might move the catalog into another system, and we might create a visual map of the books. The aim is to learn more about what influenced Millay, but also to learn more about the poetry publishing landscape in the years from 1920-1950.