Day Like Any Other, A: The Life of James Schuyler, by Nathan Kernan; 2025. Hardcover.

The biography of the poet James Schuyler, the Pulitzer Prize winner who helped shape the New York School of poetry in the 1960s.

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 his life was stable and fulfilled.