By the end of his life in 2017, John Ashbery had been a grand old man of American letters for so long that it was hard to think of him as having been young; one of the great revelations of this biography is how Ashbery's life on the family farm and in bohemian New York in the 1950s informed the complex and playful poetry he wrote in his prime. Karin Roffman spent many hours in conversation with Ashbery, and offers insight into the years that led up to his stunning 1956 debut Some Trees, while chronicling his friendships with Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Willem de Kooning.