"I wish I could press snowflakes in a book like flowers."
~James Schuyler

James Marcus Schuyler (1923-1991) was born in Chicago, Illinois to the late Marcus Schuyler and Margaret Daisy Connor Schuyler. He attended Bethany College where he studied architecture, history and literature before joining the U.S. Navy  in 1943. In spite of his initial desire to pursue a degree in architecture, Schuyler's focus began to shift after being exposed to Logan Pearcal's Unforgotten Years, and was impressed by the amount of audiovisual descriptions that were used. After having joined the U.S. Navy and resided in Italy for two years, Schuyler returned moved to New York, where he worked in a bookstore and shared an apartment with New York School poets, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbury.

Throughout the 1950's, Schuyler's writing career began to flourish, as he wrote the libretto for Paul Bowles' recording,  A Picnic Cantata (1955), his first novel, Alfred and Guinevere (1958), and two off-broadway plays: Presenting Jane (1952) and ​Shopping and Waiting (1953). Similar to John Ashbury's Turandot and Other Poems (1953), Schuyler's early poetry was published by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan, which was often symbolic of the importance of the art world in relation to the sustenance of New York School poets. 

From 1955 to 1961, he was a curator of circulating exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art while also serving as an editorial associate and critic for Art News, ​in which he wrote a substantial amount of art criticism. This enabled him to come into even greater contact with many famous New York School poets, including Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jane Freilicher and Fairfield Porter. 

From 1961 to 1973, Schuyler lived with Fairfield Porter and his family in Southampton, Long Island, and at their summer home in Maine: a time that Schuyler later described as "much the happiest period in my life". Although he was well-known and successful by the early 1980s, Schuyler turned to a life of seclusion due to his poor health and financial difficulties.