A central figure of the New York School, Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and educated at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. He worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, writing many of his poems during the working day. His collections include Meditations in an Emergency (Grove Press, 1957) and Lunch Poems (City Lights, 1964). He died at age forty after being struck by a vehicle on Fire Island. The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (Knopf, 1971) won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1972.
