City Poet - by Brad Gooch (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1993.

Book Synopsis

The definitive biography of Frank O'Hara, one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, the magnetic literary figure at the center of New York's cultural life during the 1950s and 1960s.

City Poet captures the excitement and promise of mid-twentieth-century New York in the years when it became the epicenter of the art world, and illuminates the poet and artist at its heart. Brad Gooch traces Frank O'Hara's life from his parochial Catholic childhood to World War II, through his years at Harvard and New York. He brilliantly portrays O'Hara in in his element, surrounded by a circle of writers and artists who would transform America's cultural landscape: Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and John Ashbery.

Gooch brings into focus the artistry and influence of a life "of guts and wit and style and passion" (Luc Sante) that was tragically abbreviated in 1966 when O'Hara, just forty and at the height of his creativity, was hit and killed by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island--a death that marked the end of an exceptional career and a remarkable era.

City Poet is illustrated with 55 black and white photographs.

Review Quotes

"Read Brad Gooch's fine biography of Frank, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara--it's all there and it's all true." - John Gruen, Callas Kissed Me...Lenny Too!: A Critics Memoir
"Brad Good has brought Frank O'Hara's brilliance and prescience to the attention of a new generation and beyond, alerting some and reminding others of this mercurial poet, the great New York laureate of the last of this century. . . . His life was a terrific display of guts and wit and style and passion. Gooch conveys all of this with lightness and thoroughness." - Luc Sante
"The facts of O'Hara's life receive full justice in Gooch's biography. . . . Good has gone everywhere, interviewed everyone. . . . He captures the spirit of bright cheer that blew through New York in the fifties." - The New Yorker
"A dashing, dishy, magisterial biography, City Poet is also, it must be said, a work of model scholarship." - Jim Holt, Vanity Fair
"A comprehensive and kaleidoscopic biography." - Edmund White, Vogue
"Luminously written and terrifically evocative of American cultural life in the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras." - Celia McGee, New York Observer
"As a portrait the book has a clarity and balance which makes Gooch's obvious affection for his subject very persuasive for the reader as well...Gooch delineates the social currents of O'Hara's life skillfully and entertainingly." - Geoffrey O'Brien, New York Review of Books
"Not only is this book a joy to read, it's a necessary chronicle of a fascinating, often overlooked key character in modern American letters." - Los Angeles Times
"The first biography of the poet Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) is also an extremely informative gossip-survey of the social and sexual mores of the New York avant-garde art scene in the 50s and 60s. . . . Entertaining and readable." - San Francisco Chronicle