A Day Like Any Other

Author: Nathan Kernan Publisher: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux (2025) 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’