Elinor Wylie lived a more sensational life than most heroines of fiction. Born into an aristocratic Philadelphia family prominent in national politics and close to two Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Elinor Wylie became as famous for her beauty and elegance of dress and as notorious for her personal life as she was well-known for her crisply wrought lines of verse and romantic fiction tinged with satire. She regularly scandalized high society through her impetuosity and seeming lack of decorum in matrimonial affairs, but her literary talent as well as vivacious charm made her one of the best-known writers of the 1920s. In addition to five volumes of poetry and four novels, Wylie wrote short stories, reviews, essays, criticism, and a play for magazines such as Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, the New Republic, Woman's Home Companion, and the Bookman. Much of her writing originally received...