A Day Like Any Other : The Life of James Schuyler

The long-awaited biography of the mercurial, troubled, brilliant poet James Schuyler, the Pulitzer Prize winner who helped shape the New York School of poetry in the 1960s.

Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler is the definitive biography of the great American poet who, along with Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, was one of the original members of the so-called New York School of poetry. Kernan opens with Schuyler’s legendary first public reading in 1988 and goes back to trace the tumultuous arc of the poet’s life and work.

Born in Chicago, Schuyler grew up in Washington, DC, and upstate New York, before moving to New York City in 1944, where he fell into the social orbit of the poet W. H. Auden. After two years in Italy, he returned to New York in 1949 and began to publish his first poems. There he met O’Hara, Ashbery, Guest, and Koch. Schuyler struggled periodically with mental illness and was hospitalized several times. From 1962 to 1973, he lived outside the city in Southampton, Long Island, in a close relationship with the painter Fairfield Porter and his family, spending summers in Maine, a period during which Schuyler’s great affinity with the natural world (and Porter’s paintings) was most in evidence in his work. The subsequent decade living in New York City was marked by extreme hardship, stemming from physical and mental illness and poverty. Yet during this tragic low point he wrote some of his greatest poems. With his move to the Chelsea Hotel in 1979, and especially after his last mental breakdown in 1985, Schuyler’s life began to turn around, and when he died, much too soon at sixty-seven, his life was happy and fulfilled.