I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal...

New clothes left Sylvia reeling with happiness. For Sylvia, a shopping list was a poem. She always shopped alone – it suited her deliberate nature and the artistic joy with which she approached all things...

Judgement is so often a thwarted, frustrated expression of envy.

New York is unruly, tangled. The city woos first, then mangles, then pastes back together in a fresh, dazzling mosaic.

Sylvia had begun her month in New York with princessy pomp and fanfare….Her departure on June 27 was entirely different. She left New York shaken, depleted, and utterly alone.

Her romances often seemed like dalliances; she enjoyed male company and blossomed in its presence, but she did not appear to care deeply about any of the men [Steiner]

now that the recalcitrant forsythia has at last decided to come and blurt out springtime in petalled fountains of yellow. In spite of reams of papers to be written, life has snitched a cocaine sniff...

Sylvia possessed a deeply conditioned respect for authority. She wanted desperately to live up to the expectations of a society that viewed her as a bright, charming, enormously talented disciple of bourgeois conformity. On the...

Sylvia quotes Dick as telling her: “I am afraid the demands of wifehood and motherhood would preoccupy you too much to allow you to do the painting and writing you want.” Dick was sharp enough...

You may discover that the very aspects which make it most unendurable are what gives New York its meaning. Its inconsistencies and anonymity, its seeming indifference to you and every other individual is really what...

Out of the blue Sylvia said, ‘People are like boxes. You would like to open them up and see what’s inside, but you can’t.’ Sylvia was interested in people and recognizing how individuals create their...

Sylvia rarely flattered the men in her life- she envied them. She was far more likely to compete with a man than a woman. In her journal she describes this jealousy of which she is...

For years I wondered what was her curious power, her ability to attract all kinds of people to her and to use them for her own ends, often with their knowledge. i think it was...

The very act of accepting her position at Mademoiselle was an act of open defiance against Dick Norton, his entire family, and the gendered expectations of midcentury America.

For the next nine months, Sylvia would report on campus trends, politics, tastes, style. It was an honor, but it was grueling. Sylvia was overworked. She had boyfriend problems. She longed for Europe. She broke...

That none discussed their doubts, that they assumed everyone else was just having a grand time of it and felt at ease and enjoying the ride, was perhaps the most toxic element to this particular...

writer”.

However vivid they might be, past images and future delights did not protect Sylvia from the present, which “rules despotic over pale shadows of past and future”. That was Sylvia’s genius and her Panic Bird-...

Before New York, the cracks were already there, but now they began to split open and gape, and the difference between how a thing or a place or a person appears and the reality becomes...

When I was doing the Mademoiselle application my husband would peer over my shoulder and say, “What are you doing competing with the best brains in the country? Why don’t you just wash the dishes?”...

…she could not stick by the golden mean…was always anxious to experiment in extremes…to find out what was enough by indulging herself in too much.” (Gordon Lameyer)

Cyrilly expected Sylvia – as an intelligent and ambitious young woman – to walk around pale-mouthed and flat-shoed. She saw intellectual inclinations and a taste for fashion as mutually exclusive and assumed that Sylvia would...

This is the story of an electrically alive young woman on the brink of her adult life. An artist equally attuned to the light as the shadows, with a limitless hunger for experience and knowledge,...

Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.

All year long Sylvia had been trying to overthrow her guileless, college girl image. She knew “cottons with big full skirts and university personalities” would have looked hopelessly naive in New York. Sylvia wanted to...

Sylvia’s inherent appreciation for beauty as both artist and consumer is evident in her journals and letters…….she wrote beautifully about clothes. She wrote about them with irony and wit mixed in with all the rococo...

We knew she [Sylvia] was unusual, because of the seriousness with which she was treated, the lofty importance of her job as guest managing editor, and because she was kept fast at her desk when...

These were the new girls of New York- complete with rapid heartbeats from too much nicotine and coffee. They were nervous and fluttery but completely alluring- the new face of urban femininity.

And is not all of life material- based on the material- permeated by the material? Should not one learn, gladly, to utilize the beauty of the fine material? I do not speak of the gross...

It is perhaps fortunate that Sylvia was oblivious to the commotion behind the scenes. Apparently, Henry O. Teltscher had written a letter to Betsy Talbot Blackwell, warning her that one of her guest editors was...