Violet Ranney Lang

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 family, Violet R. Lang was a debutante who began college at the University of Chicago but dropped out to join the Canadian Women's Army Corps in World War II. After the war, she was an editor for the Chicago Review (founded in 1946) and published some of her work in Chicago's Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. By 1950, Lang had returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she became a friend of Frank O'Hara. At the Poets' Theatre she appeared, with John Ashbery, 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. For a brief time in 1951 she was a burlesque dancer in Boston. She picked up Gregory Corso 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. Her play I Too Have Lived in Arcadia (1954) is based upon her love affair with the painter Michael Goldberg.

"During her lifetime, Lang published widely in respected literary journals and wrote and starred in two verse dramas: Fire Exit (1952) and I Too Have Lived in Arcadia (1954). She was a founding member of the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where both of these plays were performed."

"... Lang's best-known play, Fire Exit, is a protofeminist rewrite of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a burlesque house in New Jersey. At its end, Eurydice chooses to be alone rather than get back together with a bullying, self-pitying Orpheus."

"Her play, 'Fire Exit,' is marred by a peculiar alternation between an unfamiliar hillbilly dialect and the strained grandeur of the classical allusions. Yet there are moments of triumph that suggest a talent which had no chance to unfold."

Her father was Malcolm Burrage Lang (1881–1972), a 1902 Harvard graduate who was an organist and director of music at King's Chapel, 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. In April 1955 at Christ Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Violet R. Lang married Bradley Sawyer Phillips (1929–1991). 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.