Edward Field was born on June 7, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York, to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. He was raised in Lynbrook, Long Island, where he faced anti-Semitic harassment in school. He attended New York University, but left in 1943 to enlist in the Army. A Red Cross worker gave him a poetry anthology that inspired him to become a poet. After the war, he met the poet Frank O’Hara. Their brief relationship gave Field the courage to write openly as a gay man. His debut collection Stand Up, Friend, With Me (New York: Grove, 1963) won the Lamont Poetry Prize and led to a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1959 he met Neil Derrick, the love of his life. In 1971 Derrick developed a brain tumor, and Field became his caregiver. The two co-wrote novels as Bruce Elliot, including The Potency Clinic (1978) and Village (1982). They married in 2017, and Derrick died the following year. Field published twelve books of poetry. He died at his home in Manhattan's West Village on September 6, 2026, at age 102. For excerpts of his autobiography, see Edward Field: Autobiographical Reflections, 1924-2009, by Edward Field.