(An intimate account of the sudden rise to literary fame a...)
An intimate account of the sudden rise to literary fame and long, inexorable decline of Delmore Schwartz, a complex and deeply troubled man who was keenly aware of his own inner contradictions, as revealed by his correspondence
https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Delmore-Schwartz/dp/0865380481?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0865380481
( The publication of this book restores a missing chapter...)
The publication of this book restores a missing chapter in the history of twentieth-century American literature With his New Directions debut in 1938, the twenty-five-year-old Delmore Schwartz was hailed as a genius and among the most promising writers of his generation. Yet he died in relative obscurity in 1966, wracked by mental illness and substance abuse. Sadly, his literary legacy has been overshadowed by the story of his tragic life. Among poets, Schwartz was a prototype for the confessional movement made famous by his slightly younger friends Robert Lowell and John Berryman. While his stories and novellas about Jewish American experience laid the groundwork for novels by Saul Bellow (whose Humboldt’s Gift is based on Schwartz’s life) and Philip Roth. Much of Schwartz’s writing has been out of print for decades. This volume aims to restore Schwartz to his proper place in the canon of American literature and give new readers access to the breadth of his achievement. Included are selections from the in-print stories and poems, as well as excerpts from his long unavailable epic poem Genesis, a never-completed book-length work on T. S. Eliot, and unpublished poems from his archives.
https://www.amazon.com/Once-All-Best-Delmore-Schwartz/dp/0811224325?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0811224325
Delmore David was born on December 8, 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of Harry Schwartz, who made a fortune in real estate, and Rose Nathanson. When Schwartz was young, his parents were divorced. Soon after the onset of the Great Depression, Harry Schwartz died, and the bank named trustee of his estate allowed his fortune to dwindle through indifference or mismanagement. Young Schwartz, who had assumed he would be heir to a fortune, came of age in poverty.
After graduating from George Washington High School in Manhattan, Delmore David Schwartz enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1933. He transferred to New York University, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of arts degree in philosophy in 1935. From 1935 to 1937 he did graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University, where he studied with Alfred North Whitehead. Although he received excellent grades, he left Harvard in 1937 without completing his degree to pursue a literary life in Manhattan.
Despite his marital and mental difficulties, Schwartz wrote prolifically almost all of his adult life. His masterpiece, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, " appeared in New Directions in Prose and Poetry in 1937. The following year he published his first book, a collection of poetry and prose, under that title; it brought instant critical attention and fame. Allen Tate praised the book as "the first real innovation that we'd had since Eliot and Pound. "
In 1939 he published his translation of Rimbaud's Saison en enfer. It was savaged by reviewers, who pointed out errors in Schwartz's understanding of French. (A second, corrected edition was issued the following year. ) In 1940 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the next year published Shenandoah, an autobiographical play in verse and prose, which was well received. But the ambitious, introspective first volume of a projected two-volume poem, Genesis: Book One (1943), received mixed reviews.
In 1948 the best of Schwartz's short stories were collected in The World Is a Wedding. The book did much to reestablish his reputation and psychic equilibrium. But Vaudeville for a Princess (1950), combining poetry and prose, again brought him severe criticism.
Schwartz bounced back with a large selection of poems, Summer Knowledge (1959), which contains the best of his early work with a large number of later, long-line poems.
The last book published in his lifetime was Successful Love (1961), six stories, which received respectful reviews. During the last five years of his life, Schwartz published little.
Despite erratic mental health, he managed throughout his career to hold teaching jobs at Harvard (1940 - 1947), Princeton (1949 - 1950), Kenyon College (1950), Indiana University (1951), the University of Chicago (1954), and Syracuse University (1962 - 1965). He was editor (1943 - 1947) and associate editor (1947 - 1955) of the Partisan Review and poetry editor and film critic for the New Republic (1955 - 1957).
Schwartz died in New York City, where he had been living in a seedy Times Square hotel.
Although Delmore David Schwartz was gifted as a fiction writer and critic, it is for his poetry that he is best remembered. From his early Yeatsian lyrics to his later Whitmanesque catalogs, his was a poetry of major conflicts and changes, of the individual in conflict with time and the times. His best poems include "The Ballad of the Children of the Czar", "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave" and the sequence "Coriolanus and His Mother. " Perhaps no poet of his period so skillfully depicted the threat of change in humankind. Schwartz was the youngest poet ever to win the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Summer Knowledge (1959), and the Shelley Memorial Prize in 1960.
( The publication of this book restores a missing chapter...)
(An intimate account of the sudden rise to literary fame a...)
Quotations: It was he who observed, "Even paranoids have real enemies. "
Memoirs about his student period tend to emphasize Schwartz's good looks, his noble features, large head, and dignified gait. Later in life, drink and drugs coarsened his features, thickened his frame, and made his gait a shuffle. Throughout his life, however, he was known as a wit and raconteur.
On June 14, 1938, Schwartz married his high school sweetheart, Gertrude Buckman, who held various editorial jobs. The marriage ended in divorce in 1943.
On June 10, 1949, Schwartz married the novelist Elizabeth Pollet. He constantly accused her of infidelity and "grand larceny" (a reference to her withdrawal of funds from their joint account). She obtained a divorce in 1957. During the last months of the marriage, in 1956, Schwartz kept company with Eleanor Goff, a dancer who lived in Greenwich Village. From this romance, it appears, Schwartz fathered his only child, a daughter, who was raised by Goff and the man who married her after Schwartz broke with her, Walter Doerfler. Doerfler was never told the name of the natural father of the baby, nor was the daughter told until she was sixteen.
