Milford and Mitford

I've never won any awards for spelling, so it occurred to me this morning that some readers might be -- very understandably -- thinking I botched an author's name in two recent posts. But that wasn't a mistake; she actually is Milford, the American biographer Nancy Milford, with an L, easy to confuse with the prolific British writer Nancy Mitford.

London-born Mitford, the eldest of the famous Mitford sisters, died in 1973. Milford currently serves on the board of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, CUNY. With Gatsby fever going around, I've become engrossed in her 1970 Pulitzer Prize-finalist biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. The NY Times best-seller grew out of her masters thesis and changed public perceptions of Zelda. Sidenote, just in case you're curious: Milford's book was published about four years before Coppola's take on Gatsby hit the big screen. Notice the bold font-centric design of the original book jacket? I'm looking into that too.