Frank O’Hara

Frank O’Hara, the author of Meditations in an Emergency, was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. From 1951 until his untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty lived in New York City, and worked for both for Art News and for the Museum of Modem Art, where he was an associate curator. During this period, O’Hara evolved a new kind of urban poetry that brilliantly captures the heady excitements of a golden period in the city’s artistic life. He was at the heart of a vibrant artistic circle that embraced fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, as well as experimental painters such as Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jasper Johns.