The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O'Hara

Edited by William Corbett

Pearl Without Price,

First the worst: your five dollar check bounced. N'import. I made it good, and you can pay me back when ... the primroses come back to 49th Street.

Everybody is sick. The boys [Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale] from air travel, me with a bug in the gut that keeps me lolling in the can. And the streets are swimming in swill, like the opening of Bleak House.

Arthur thumbs-downed the apt on 21st Street, and we're going to live in the Chelsea!

Poet Mark Ford has described the letters of James Schuyler as "witty, graceful, sophisticated, and gossipy." Particularly poignant are these Schuyler letters to fellow poet Frank O'Hara. Entertaining and transcendently poetic, they are the portrait of a friendship between two great New York School poets.

October 2006, Letters, Poetry, 6 x 7 1/2, 96 pages, Paperback, $16.95, ISBN 1-885586-49-3

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About the Author

James Schuyler, recipient of the 1981 Pulitzer prize for Poetry belonged to the first generation of New York School Poets along with John O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest. His Collected poems was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux.

William Corbett, Editor of both Just the Thing, Selected letters of James Schuyler and The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara is a poet, memoirist and art critic. He teaches in the program of Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT.

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