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 an original member of the so called New York School of poetry. Opening with Schuyler’s legendary first public reading in 1988, 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 in 1949 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 in 1979, the poet’s circumstances began to turn around, and when he died, much too soon at sixty-seven, his life was stable and fulfilled.

In praise of Schuyler’s poetry, John Ashbery wrote: ＂To reread him is to live, as though life were an experience one had just forgotten and been newly awakened to.＂ Schuyler’s work embodies the quiet beauties of the natural world and the mundane stuff of everyday existence, even as his own life was often messy and troubled. A Day Like Any Other, Kernan’s absorbing biographical study, explores this and other paradoxes of Schuyler’s singular life within the vibrant milieu of mid-century New York’s poets and painters.

Nathan Kernan is the editor of The Diary of James Schuyler. He lives in New York.