Violet Ranney "Bunny" Lang (married name Phillips, 11 May 1924 – 29 July 1956) was an American poet and playwright.

Biography

Born into a wealthy

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

family, Violet R. Lang was a

debutante A debutante, also spelled débutante, ( ; from french: débutante , "female beginner") or deb is a young woman of aristocratic or upper-class family background who has reached maturity and, as a new adult, is presented to society at a formal " ...

who began college at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

but dropped out to join the

Canadian Women's Army Corps The Canadian Women's Army Corps was a non-combatant branch of the Canadian Army for women, established during the Second World War, with the purpose of releasing men from those non-combatant roles in the Canadian armed forces as part of expanding ...

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. After the war, she was an editor for the ''

Chicago Review ''Chicago Review'' is a literary magazine founded in 1946 and published quarterly in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. The magazine features contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism, often publishing works in translation and ...

'' (founded in 1946) and published some of her work in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

's ''Poetry: A Magazine of Verse''. By 1950, Lang had returned to

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

, where she became a friend of

Frank O'Hara Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure i ...

. At the Poets' Theatre she appeared, with

John Ashbery John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...

, in the first production of O'Hara's play ''Try! Try!'' (1951). Among the poets of the New York School, she was a close friend to Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, and

Kenneth Koch Kenneth Koch ( ; 27 February 1925 – 6 July 2002) was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77. He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry. This was a loose group of poets includ ...

. For a brief time in 1951 she was a burlesque dancer in Boston. She picked up

Gregory Corso Gregory Nunzio Corso (March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001) was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burrough ...

on the streets of New York City and persuaded her friends in Cambridge to help him live on a dorm room floor in Harvard's

Eliot House Eliot House is one of twelve undergraduate residential Houses at Harvard University. It is one of the seven original houses at the college. Opened in 1931, the house was named after Charles William Eliot, who served as president of the universit ...

. Her play ''I Too Have Lived in Arcadia'' (1954) is based upon her love affair with the painter Michael Goldberg.p. 280
/ref> Her father was Malcolm Burrage Lang (1881–1972), a 1902 Harvard graduate who was an organist and director of music at

King's Chapel King's Chapel is an American independent christianity, Christian unitarianism, unitarian congregation affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association that is "unitarian Christian in theology, anglicanism, Anglican in worship, and congrega ...

, Boston. Her mother was Ethel Ranney Lang, whose father Fletcher Ranney was a Boston lawyer. Violet R. Lang was the youngest of the six children (all daughters) of Malcolm and Ethel Lang, who raised their family at 209

Bay State Road The Boston University housing system is the 2nd-largest of any private university in the United States, with 76% of the undergraduate population living on campus. On-campus housing at BU is an unusually diverse melange, ranging from individual 19t ...

. In April 1955 at Christ Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Violet R. Lang married Bradley Sawyer Phillips (1929–1991). (Bradley Phillips's father was the archaeologist Philip Phillips.) She died of Hodgkin's disease at age 32. Frank O'Hara wrote a series of poems from 1956 to 1959 in mourning her death.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lang, Violet Ranney 1924 births 1956 deaths 20th-century American poets 20th-century American women writers American women poets American women dramatists and playwrights Writers from Boston University of Chicago alumni