When Edna St. Vincent Millay was a teenager in Maine at the turn of the 20th century, she impressed her peers with the sharp intelligence that would later help make her famous far beyond her hometown. As one former classmate said, “She hadn’t learned, as many brilliant women do, to conceal her superior gifts from us young male clods.”

Throughout her life, Millay chose to display her talents rather than hide them. At the time of her death in 1950, she could list on a virtual resume more than 500 poems, six plays, an opera, and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Thomas Hardy once said that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

An exhibit opening today in the library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, “Burning the Candle at Both Ends,” provides a glimpse into this writer’s life.

The small collection includes a short film on her life at Steepletop – the 700-acre farm in upstate New York where she spent the last 25 years of her life – and a display of personal objects including a typewriter and a mason jar of homemade raspberry preserves found in her cellar.

Millay lived in Greenwich Village between 1917 and 1925, including a brief tenancy at 75 1/2 Bedford St., the city’s narrowest house. It was in New York that she wrote “The First Fig,” which opens with one her most famous lines: “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-/ It gives a lovely light!”

She and her two sisters enjoyed the bohemian life, sharing tiny apartments and socializing with Edmund Wilson and the novelist Floyd Dell. The sisters made money by writing poetry and acting in plays. (Although not quite enough, apparently: The exhibit notes that they were once “threatened with eviction for nonpayment of rent.”)

The exhibit is sponsored by the New York City-based Friends of the Millay Society. In September, the group will present a Steepletop Festival in Austerlitz, N.Y., with readings of Millay’s poetry and a concert performance of her opera, “The King’s Henchman.”

The group’s secretary, Whitney North Seymour Jr., describes Millay as a model of vitality (and not just in her much-discussed love life): When her original manuscripts of the poetry collection “Conversations at Midnight” burned in a hotel fire in Florida, she sat down and rewrote it from memory. “That’s a gutsy person,” Mr. Seymour said.

Exhibit: Today through Friday, September 30, Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m., General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen Library, 20 W. 44th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-840-1840, free.

Steepletop Festival: Saturday, September 17, and Sunday, September 18, Austerlitz, N.Y., 914-232-6583, $15 each program, $50 entire weekend. For more information, go to www.millay.org.