James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance, writes John Ashbery in his new introduction to this classic of American comic fiction. We were in a car being driven by the young cameraman, Harrison Starr, with his father as a passenger in the front seat…Jimmy said, ‘Why don’t we write a novel?’ And how do we do that, I asked. ‘It’s easy–you write the first line,’ was his reply. The result is one of the strangest and most exuberant experiments in American literary history, a verbal tour de force of suburban Americana. First published in 1969, A Nest of Ninnies is a true gem-in-the-rough, the decades-long collaborative project from two of the great poetic minds of the twentieth century.