Francis V. O'Connor (1937-2017) was a New York Art Historian and poet who researched and wrote extensively on Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Federal Arts Project (FAP), and mural painting in America. Born in Brooklyn, New York, O'Connor received his Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1965 after completing his dissertation on Jackson Pollock. He taught contemporary European and American art history at the University of Maryland from 1964 to 1970. While at Maryland, he organized the country's first comprehensive exhibition of New Deal art programs since their ending in 1943. From 1967 to 1968, he also headed a research program for the National Endowment for the Arts to analyze the effectiveness of New Deal art patronage, which eventually led to the publication of Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The New Deal and Now (1969), New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs (1972), and Art for the Millions (1973). In 1972, he formed a commission to assess the authenticity of thousands of works by Jackson Pollock, alongside the art dealer and collector Eugene V. Thaw (b.1927), MoMA curator Bill Lieberman, Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner Pollock (1908-1984) and the art dealer Donald McKinney. This resulted in O'Connor and Thaw's four-volume catalogue raisonné on Jackson Pollock in 1978, still the leading resource for initial study of Pollock.