An intimate encounter with four young poets on their way to literary fame in the grit and glitter of postwar New York

“This is literary history at its most engaging. . . . A compelling account of how art emerges from the charged space between individual genius and collective life.” —Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

New York immediately after World War II: Chelsea lofts were $20 a month and filled with painters. Downtown crawled with young veterans and recent grads with artistic ambitions. Gay and lesbian city dwellers lived openly but were still wary of homophobic violence and legal prosecution. Amid this dazzling bohemia, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, four young poets on the rise, found one another.

This quartet formed the core of the New York School of Poets, and they were an integral part of the city’s literary scene at the pinnacle of its prosperity and influence. All around them was a seemingly unending procession of artistic innovations: from action painting to hard bop, Beat poetry to Pop Art. They attended the same parties and exhibitions, drank in the same bars, and slept with the same people. They were a collective powered by loyalty, mutual encouragement, and competition. They didn’t reject the establishment so much as they ignored it, seeking to “do something with language / That has never been done before,” as Koch wrote in his poem “Days and Nights.”

Kindley expertly guides readers through the dorm rooms, editorial offices, gay bars, art galleries, Fire Island summerhouses, and squalid midtown apartments in which the New York School was shaped. Both nostalgic and clear-sighted, The New York School combines biography, cultural history, and literary analysis to paint a striking group portrait of this legendary coterie, highlighting fame and folly, competition and collaboration, and, most of all, enduring friendship.