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John Ashbery (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

Biography

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, to Chester Frederick and Helen (Lawrence) Ashbery. He spent much of his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in northern New York, close to the shores of Lake Ontario. He attended Deerfield Academy and went on to Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1949; his undergraduate thesis examined the poetry of the British writer W. H. Auden. During Ashbery's early years he had wanted to be a painter, but he studied English literature at college, and in 1951 he was granted an M.A. by Columbia University for his study of...

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