The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life

The first biography of an American master

The Songs We Know Best, the first comprehensive biography of the early life of John Ashbery—the winner of nearly every major American literary award—reveals the unusual ways he drew on the details of his youth to populate the poems that made him one of the most original and unpredictable forces of the last century in arts and letters.

Drawing on unpublished correspondence, juvenilia, and childhood diaries as well as more than one hundred hours of conv...