Description
Book SynopsisA landmark work of cultural history that tells the story of how four young poets, John Ashbery, Frank O''Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, reinvented literature and turned New York into the art capital of the world.Greenwich Village, New York, circa 1951. Every night, at a rundown tavern with a magnificent bar called the Cedar Tavern, an extraordinary group or painters, writers, poets, and hangers-on arrive to drink, argue, tell jokes, fight, start affairs, and bang out a powerful new aesthetic. Their style is playful, irreverent, tradition-shattering, and brilliant. Out of these friendships, and these conversations, will come the works of art and poetry that will define New York City as the capital of world culture--abstract expressionism and the New York School of Poetry.
A richly detailed portrait of one of the great movements in American arts and letters,
The Last Avant-Garde covers the years 1948-1966 and focuses on four fast friends--t
