Joe LeSueur (1924 - May 14, 2001) was a decorated soldier when he moved to
New York in 1949, at the age of twenty-five. He held jobs as an editor,
critic, and screenwriter. He died in 2001 in East Hampton.In 1951 Joe LeSueur moved into an apartment in New York City with Frank O'Hara, who would be his roommate and sometime lover for the next 11 years.
Joe LeSueur lived with Frank O'Hara until 1965, the years when O'Hara wrote his greatest poems, including 'To the Film Industry in Crisis', 'In Memory of My Feelings', 'Having a Coke with You', and the famous Lunch Poems-so called because O'Hara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of O'Hara's talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced America's greatest poet of city life since Whitman.
