American poet James Schuyler was BOTD in 1923. Born in Chicago, Illinois to a middle-class family, he studied at Bethany College in West Virginia and served in the US Navy during World War Two. After the war, he settled in New York City where he worked for the National Broadcasting Company and befriended the notorious homosexual poet W. H. Auden. He moved with Auden to Italy in 1947, working as Auden’s secretary and attending classes at the University of Florence. Returning to New York in the late 1940s, he worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and wrote for Art News magazine, began writing novels and plays. After largely unsuccessful attempts to write plays and fiction, he published his first poetry collection, Salute, in 1960. He befriended a largely homosexual literary circle, including fellow poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest. He became a central figure in the New York School of American post-war poetry, forgoing formalism in favour of day-to-day experience and informal, conversational language. He became better known in the 1970s with the poetry collections Freely Espousing, The Crystal Lithium and Hymn to Life. In 1981, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection The Morning of the Poem. Discreetly gay, he had relationships with the soldier William Aalto and artist John Button, and struggled for many years with bipolar disorder. He died in 1991, aged 67.