Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet, and art critic.
17 Facts About Frank O'Hara
2.
Frank O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.
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Frank O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary".
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The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen, the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry.
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Frank O'Hara, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine, was born on March 27,1926, at Maryland General Hospital, Baltimore and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts.
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Frank O'Hara studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944 and served in the US Navy in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.
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Frank O'Hara was heavily influenced by visual art and by contemporary music, which was his first love.
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Frank O'Hara attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
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Frank O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for ARTnews, and in 1960 was assistant curator of painting and sculpture exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art.
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Frank O'Hara was a friend of the artists Norman Bluhm, Mike Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Larry Rivers.
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The essay encouraged Frank O'Hara to write poetry that was embarrassing in its directness, and even seen as hostile to literary standards then in place.
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Frank O'Hara's poetry began to erase poetry's cautious border between what is public and what is private.
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Frank O'Hara met Joe LeSueur in 1951, and the two maintained a relationship until 1965, living together on and off from 1955 to 1965.
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Frank O'Hara met longtime partner Vincent Warren in the summer of 1959.
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Frank O'Hara died the next day at age 40 of a ruptured liver at Bayview Hospital in Mastic Beach, Long Island.
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Frank O'Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery on Long Island.
17.
Frank O'Hara is a minor character in William Boyd's 2002 novel Any Human Heart.