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.
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.
[2] 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).
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.
[6]Her play, "Fire Exit," is marred by a peculiar alternation between an unfamiliar hillbilly dialect and the strained grandeur of the classical allusions.