Millay further substantiated her place in American literature with tour de force sonneteering in The Ballad of the Harp Weaver and Other Poems (1923), which netted her a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first given to a female writer. After her marriage to Dutch-American importer Eugen Jan Boissevain, her health failed. The couple settled in the Berkshires at Steepletop, a secluded 700-acre farm in Austerlitz, New York, in 1925. Collaborating with Deems Taylor, she supplied a blank verse libretto written solely in one-sylable words for the wildly popular The King's Henchman (1927), which the Metropolitan Opera produced on stage and in a popular book form.
Still dedicated to radical issues despite her compromised energies, Millay crusaded for clemency for anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a cause célèbre of the period commemorated in "Justice Denied in Massachusetts" and "Fear," a vehement diatribe published in Outlook. She kept vigil at the Boston Court House the night in 1927 when the pair were executed for payroll robbery and murder, and she dedicated proceeds from The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems (1928) to their posthumous defense. Lacking her youthful verve, she battled headaches, visual distortion, and undiagnosed abdominal pain while writing spirited, intensely personal verse laced with contemporary themes, collected in Fatal Interview (1931) and Wine from These Grapes (1934), which features a superb sonnet sequence, Epitaph for the Race of Man. In addition, she honored her friend and colleague, poet Elinor Wylie, with six elegies in Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939).
