A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler

Summary

Nathan Kernan's A Day Like Any Other is the definitive biography of the great American poet who was an original member of the so called New York School of poetry. Kernan goes back to trace the tumultuous arc of the poet's life and work.

Born in Chicago in 1923, James 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 and began to publish his first poems. There he met fellow poets O'Hara, Ashbery, Guest, and Koch. For many years he lived outside the city in Southampton, Long Island, in a close relationship with the painter Fairfield Porter and his family, and spent his summers in Maine. Schuyler's subsequent years in New York City were marked by poverty and mental illness, yet it was during this time that he wrote some of his greatest poems. After his move to the Chelsea Hotel, the poet's circumstances began to turn around, and when he died, his life was stable and fulfilled.

Schuyler's work embodies the quiet beauties of the natural world and the mundane stuff of everyday existence, even as his life was often messy and troubled. A Day Like Any Other explores this and other paradoxes of Schuyler's life within the vibrant milieu of mid-century New York's poets and painters.