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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 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 “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’s A Day Like Any 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 “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.
513 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 5, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 7, 2025
A superb biography of a great poet. Here is my review here:
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May 20, 2025
This book is a comprehensive, well written biography of James Schuyler, a significant American poet and Pulitzer prize winner. It demonstrates the author’s meticulous research, no doubt drawing on the previous work he did editing the “Diary of James Schuyler”, published in 1996.
The title draws no doubt, on the poets idea that meaning and emotional depth lie in the ordinary, the every day, so it’s a fitting homage to Schuyler’s view of the world where no day is truly “like any other“ when seen through the eyes of a poet, observing the world and people around him. “A day like any other” offers an intimate glimpse into the daily life and inner world of one of the most quietly profound poets of the 20th century. Understanding his upbringing and his working life, you can appreciate the human foundation beneath his poetry—one that is marked by fragility, humour, resilience, and a clarity of perception.
The biography begins with Schuyler’s first public reading in 1988, then follows his life chronologically, from his Chicago birth to his formative years in Washington, D.C., and upstate New York, to his immersion in New York City’s literary scene in 1944. There, he met W. H. Auden and became associated with the New York School poets. These included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest. Whilst he was probably the most emotionally and vulnerable of the group, they all shared a love of spontaneity and had deep ties to the visual arts particularly abstraction and a rejection of rigid formality. Poetry was for them a lived and personal present tense experience.
Despite mental illness and hospitalisation (He suffered with schizophrenia), Schuyler produced profound work during these challenging times. Living with painter Fairfield Porter in Southampton and summers in Maine influenced his affinity for nature. It was there that he met with Peter Ackroyd, the author who was at Cambridge and knew my brother-in-law, who incidentally was also a poet. Despite poverty and health issues, his later years at the Chelsea Hotel signified a renewal until his death at relatively young age of sixty-seven.
Whether you come to this volume as a devoted fan of Schuyler’s poetry, a student of the New York School, or someone new to his work, as I was, A day like any other is a luminous and unforgettable must read. I have no hesitation in giving this superb work five stars.
My thanks to Farr, Strauss and Giroux, the author Nathan Kernan and to NetGalley for providing an uncorrected digital galley copy.
The title draws no doubt, on the poets idea that meaning and emotional depth lie in the ordinary, the every day, so it’s a fitting homage to Schuyler’s view of the world where no day is truly “like any other“ when seen through the eyes of a poet, observing the world and people around him. “A day like any other” offers an intimate glimpse into the daily life and inner world of one of the most quietly profound poets of the 20th century. Understanding his upbringing and his working life, you can appreciate the human foundation beneath his poetry—one that is marked by fragility, humour, resilience, and a clarity of perception.
The biography begins with Schuyler’s first public reading in 1988, then follows his life chronologically, from his Chicago birth to his formative years in Washington, D.C., and upstate New York, to his immersion in New York City’s literary scene in 1944. There, he met W. H. Auden and became associated with the New York School poets. These included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest. Whilst he was probably the most emotionally and vulnerable of the group, they all shared a love of spontaneity and had deep ties to the visual arts particularly abstraction and a rejection of rigid formality. Poetry was for them a lived and personal present tense experience.
Despite mental illness and hospitalisation (He suffered with schizophrenia), Schuyler produced profound work during these challenging times. Living with painter Fairfield Porter in Southampton and summers in Maine influenced his affinity for nature. It was there that he met with Peter Ackroyd, the author who was at Cambridge and knew my brother-in-law, who incidentally was also a poet. Despite poverty and health issues, his later years at the Chelsea Hotel signified a renewal until his death at relatively young age of sixty-seven.
Whether you come to this volume as a devoted fan of Schuyler’s poetry, a student of the New York School, or someone new to his work, as I was, A day like any other is a luminous and unforgettable must read. I have no hesitation in giving this superb work five stars.
My thanks to Farr, Strauss and Giroux, the author Nathan Kernan and to NetGalley for providing an uncorrected digital galley copy.
September 18, 2025
An exceptionally-written biography. Kernan does fine work at telling the story of Schuyler's life in an engaging manner that often reads as a novel. Some of the latter chapters lean a bit too heavily on cataloguing dates and events in a manner that verges on listing, but this is my own stylistic criticism and may not bother others. The research that went into crafting a seamless narrative is astounding; not having read other work by Kernan, I might easily imagine this being the magnum opus of his career. Most biographies I would not recommend for their engaging storytelling—this one I would, enthusiastically.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews