Gooch presents a fascinating account of Frank O'Hara's life (1926-1966) and evokes the spirit and excitement of New York's literary and artistic underground in the '50s and '60s. "An intelligent, balanced, readable account of a writer's life and millieu."--Los Angeles Times. Photos.
| ||||||||||||||||||
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more. |
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Short story writer and poet Gooch has written a fine and lively biography of O'Hara, who was killed at the age of 40 in 1966 by a speeding Jeep on the beach at Fire Island after living through the whirlwind of artistic and bohemian life in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Grafton, Mass., O'Hara left his strict Catholic father and alcoholic mother for the Navy before matriculating at Harvard and venturing to the University of Michigan. Gooch paints the everyday details of O'Hara's life--he was a published poet, a critic for ArtNews and a curator at the Museum of Modern Art --with friendly and specific strokes. His career, loves and influences in New York City are all here: correspondence with John Ashbery about William Carlos Williams; posing nude while employed at MOMA; angry bouts with abstract painter Grace Hartigan, etc. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
Gooch offers a lengthy first biography of Frank O'Hara, the New York School poet of the Fifties and Sixties who espoused the Abstract Expressionism that gave way to Pop Art. Born of a Massachusetts Irish Catholic family, O'Hara contemplated music as a career but, after serving in the navy and attending Harvard, he decided on poetry. He did graduate work at the University of Michigan, then came to New York and became a poet, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and critic for ArtNews. He assisted many avant-garde poets and painters; his multimedia outlook marks much of his poetry. This well-researched book is generously garnished both with samples of his work and his homosexual attachments and details his struggle with alcohol. Tragically, O'Hara was struck and killed by a car in 1966, at the age of 40. Recommended for general and special collections.
- Kenneth Mintz, Hoboken P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
- Kenneth Mintz, Hoboken P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
City Poet goes past the Frank O'Hara that readers get to know so well through his poetry. If you have read and enjoyed O'Hara's work, this book gives you the biographical background to bring your appreciation full circle. It is no quick read, but it allows you to appreciate the man behind the words through meticulous interviews with everyone who knew him.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This happens to be one of those heavy biographies that for better or worse include everything the author ever found out about his subject, much of which isn't worth recording. Biographers should learn that just because something's a fact doesn't make it interesting. Having said that, this book isn't without its virtues. I found the passages dealing with his interaction with artists and co-workers informative. It was very interesting to discover that O'Hara's college roommate was Edward Gorey - what an odd couple. Also, the details of O'Hara serving as Cecil Beaton's secretary were enjoyable. I did learn some things about O'Hara's sexual adventures that made me cringe (having lived through the plague years my view is compromised). Mr. Gooch has written a book full of facts and trivia - it's certainly a worthwhile chronicle of O'Hara's life. If you're looking for a more intimate portrait I recommend "Digression On Some Poems By Frank O'Hara," for a more academic look at his work look for "Poet Among Painters."
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I'm not a poetry scholar, and I actually found out about O'Hara through Jim Carroll, the late punk poet who admired "Lunch Poems" for their accessibility and followed O'Hara home one day three weeks before his death. Since O'Hara was well before the punk era and indeed, didn't even seem to be in the pantheon of beat poets, I was curious about him and picked up a copy of this biography when I came across it secondhand. It is a very thick, dense read but the density comes from a meticulous examination of details of O'Hara's life and times, not from scholarly analysis of his poetry (which does seem to have been written on the fly more often than not - but I'm the type who doesn't see anything wrong with that approach) nor from the length of his life. The most jarring thing about this book was to learn that O'Hara died at the young age of 40 and yet had managed to pack more interesting experiences and contacts into that short lifetime than most people cram into 75 or 80 years. While some of this no doubt stemmed from his wartime experiences, the war and the ensuing college education for veterans having exposed a generation of young men to horizons they otherwise wouldn't have had, I also got the feeling that Frank was a restless soul who would have been bored with the strictures of a conventional existence in Massachusetts and would have found some way to kick over the traces, war or no war.
O'Hara's homosexuality and his relationships with men are major themes of the book, and understandably so given the prejudice against homosexuals in the U.S. during his lifetime. To be a man openly in love with other men pretty much guaranteed you weren't going to have a "normal" life. The types of jobs you could hold, the people you'd have as friends, and your relations with your family members were all likely to be affected to some degree. However, this was just one aspect of the book, which as others have noted does seemingly go into detail about every aspect of O'Hara's life, from before he was born straight up to his funeral. The research that must have gone into writing this book is very impressive.
Frank's untimely death at the end left me wondering "what if" he had lived. Would he have become a jaded old (and old-fashioned) guy left behind in the wake of the new poets and artists emerging in the 60s, or would he have gone on to more interesting experiences in the worlds of poetry and art? Clearly Frank, without knowing it, was having an influence on then-unknown Jim Carroll and probably on others, and perhaps that's how his legacy lives on.
If you're looking for discussions of O'Hara's creative process, or studies connecting his life and his poems, or analysis of his poems or where he falls in the pantheon of poets, this is probably not the book you want to plow through. If, instead, you're interested in a biography of a creative and unusual person, with creative and unusual friends, that was set during an exciting period of U.S. history, this book is for you.
O'Hara's homosexuality and his relationships with men are major themes of the book, and understandably so given the prejudice against homosexuals in the U.S. during his lifetime. To be a man openly in love with other men pretty much guaranteed you weren't going to have a "normal" life. The types of jobs you could hold, the people you'd have as friends, and your relations with your family members were all likely to be affected to some degree. However, this was just one aspect of the book, which as others have noted does seemingly go into detail about every aspect of O'Hara's life, from before he was born straight up to his funeral. The research that must have gone into writing this book is very impressive.
Frank's untimely death at the end left me wondering "what if" he had lived. Would he have become a jaded old (and old-fashioned) guy left behind in the wake of the new poets and artists emerging in the 60s, or would he have gone on to more interesting experiences in the worlds of poetry and art? Clearly Frank, without knowing it, was having an influence on then-unknown Jim Carroll and probably on others, and perhaps that's how his legacy lives on.
If you're looking for discussions of O'Hara's creative process, or studies connecting his life and his poems, or analysis of his poems or where he falls in the pantheon of poets, this is probably not the book you want to plow through. If, instead, you're interested in a biography of a creative and unusual person, with creative and unusual friends, that was set during an exciting period of U.S. history, this book is for you.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, incisive study
It is natural to be pleased with a study you have some knowledge of. This is a well-written, insightful study of O'Hara's life and work.
Published 10 days ago by P. L. McNamara
1.0 out of 5 stars
An Incredible Bore
It's not surprising that Brad Gooch, a professional homosexual, writes a book that makes Frank O'Hara appear to be nothing more than another professional homosexual. Read more
Published on August 29, 2002
1.0 out of 5 stars
Boring -- too much about sex
This book focused way too much on O'Hara's sex life and not enough on his work. The prose style is tedious, and I found myself skimming it through all the excruciating details... Read more
Published on August 14, 1999
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Listmania!
|
|
