In her lifetime Elinor Hoyt Wylie won notoriety for her unconventional private life and acclaim for her poems and novels. Carl Van Doren celebrated her as a "poet and queen of poets." Prominent members of the New York literary scene in the 1920s--such as Edmund Wilson, Carl Van Vechten, and her third husband, William Rose Benét--admired her beauty and literary achievements.

The daughter of Henry Martyn and Anne McMichael Hoyt, Wylie was born into a socially and politically prominent family in Somerville, New Jersey. (Later, believing Somerville insufficiently romantic, she hoped that people would imagine Paris or Persepolis as her place of birth.) Her family moved to Rosemont, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, in 1887. In 1897 her father became assistant attorney general of the United States, taking the family to Washington, D.C. Although her life outwardly traced a romantic course, her three marriages never brought her...