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 Millay 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.
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