Frank O'Hara
O'Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. During the last years of World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific and Japan on a destroyer. After the war he attended Harvard University. At first, he studied music but then changed to English to become a writer. His roommate at Harvard was the artist Edward Gorey. He also became friends there with the poet John Ashbery.