Background
Delmore Schwartz was born on December 8, 1913 in Brooklyn. Son of Harry and Rose (Nathanson) Schwartz.
(A new edition of the definitive book on the depression-er...)
A new edition of the definitive book on the depression-era immigrant experience in New York City. Now with an exciting new preface by rock musician Lou Reed (Delmore Schwartz’s student at Syracuse), In Dreams Begin Responsibilities collects eight of Schwartz’s finest delineations of New York’s intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. As no other writer can, Schwartz captures the speech, the generational conflicts, the mocking self-analysis of educated, ambitious, Depression-stymied young people at odds with their immigrant parents. This is the unique American dilemma Irving Howe described as “that interesting point where intellectual children of immigrant Jews are finding their way into the larger world while casting uneasy, rueful glances over their backs.” Afterwords by James Atlas and Irving Howe place the stories in their historical and cultural setting.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811220036/?tag=2022091-20
(“Every point of view, every kind of knowledge and every k...)
“Every point of view, every kind of knowledge and every kind of experience is limited and ignorant: nevertheless so far as l know, this volume seems to me to be as representative as it could be.―-Delmore Schwartz When this book was first published (as Summer Knowledge) in 1959. Delmore Schwartz was still riding a crest, the golden boy of the literary scene―a position he had commanded ever since the appearance of his first collection of stories and poems in 1938. Summer Knowledge won for him both the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. lronically, indeed tragically, the praise and prizes Schwartz's poems received did not forestall his decline, and this, his poetic testament, proved to be a final one as well. Overcome by mental illness, alienated from his friends and supporters, he disappeared from the literary scene, in the end to die in 1966 in an obscure Broadway hotel. The tragedy of his life pales before the triumph of his art and craft. Selected Poems clearly places him among the foremost poets of his generation.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811201910/?tag=2022091-20
(The publication of this book restores a missing chapter i...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811224325/?tag=2022091-20
(A new edition of the definitive book on the depression-er...)
A new edition of the definitive book on the depression-era immigrant experience in New York City. Now with an exciting new preface by rock musician Lou Reed (Delmore Schwartz’s student at Syracuse), In Dreams Begin Responsibilities collects eight of Schwartz’s finest delineations of New York’s intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. As no other writer can, Schwartz captures the speech, the generational conflicts, the mocking self-analysis of educated, ambitious, Depression-stymied young people at odds with their immigrant parents. This is the unique American dilemma Irving Howe described as “that interesting point where intellectual children of immigrant Jews are finding their way into the larger world while casting uneasy, rueful glances over their backs.” Afterwords by James Atlas and Irving Howe place the stories in their historical and cultural setting.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811220036/?tag=2022091-20
(Clear, precise, graceful...(Atlas') biographical style ma...)
Clear, precise, graceful...(Atlas') biographical style makes the book read with the pleasure of a good novel.--Leonard Michaels, The New York Times Book Review
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1566491207/?tag=2022091-20
Delmore Schwartz was born on December 8, 1913 in Brooklyn. Son of Harry and Rose (Nathanson) Schwartz.
His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him. He had a younger brother, Kenneth In 1930, Schwartz's father suddenly died at the age of 49. Though Harry had accumulated a good deal of wealth from his dealings in the real estate business, Delmore only inherited a small amount of that money as the result of the shady dealings of the executor of Harry's estate. According to Schwartz's biographer, James Atlas, "Delmore continued to hope that he would eventually receive his legacy as late as 1946."
Schwartz spent time at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin before finally graduating from New York University in 1935.
He then did some graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University, where he studied with the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, but left and returned to New York without receiving a degree.
Schwartz became an important voice in the increasingly critical examination of contemporary life that governed America in the aftermath of the depression. Having been the editor for the Partisan Review and poetry editor and movie critic for the New Republic, Schwartz gained overnight recognition with the publication of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities(1938). In a review of the book, Allen Tate wrote that Schwartz’s poetic style was “the only genuine innovation since Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot came upon the scene twenty-five years ago.” This book includes a long philosophical poem about a young man in search of stability and coherence in a world torn between fact and fantasy, reason and emotion.
The self-conscious and introspective nature of his language is expanded upon in Shenandoah (1941), a short play dealing with the ever-increasing absence of meaning in the life of a poet of the 1930s. In 1943 he published his most ambitious work, Genesis, Book l, a long introspective poem having as its central figure, a young, sensitive American of Russian-Jewish origin growing up in New York City. Presenting a genuinely tragic view of life, this work deals with the struggle to develop and maintain a unique selfhood. Schwartz succeeds in interlocking theology and the mythology of his times in a very innovative manner. The Imitation of Life (1943), a volume of critical essays on the plight of the immigrant to the United States, was followed by The World Is a Wedding (1948), a collection of witty, sometimes angry, short stories about middle-class Jewish life. Summer Knowledge (1959), a collection of poems, was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1960.
After resigning as visiting professor at Syracuse University in 1965, he was rarely seen even by his literary friends. Having lived in Greenwich Village for the latter part of his life, Schwartz was known as a quick and emotional person who talked so fast his words would often merge together. He died a lonely death in amidtown New York hotel.
He was the model for Von Humboldt Flesher in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift.
(The publication of this book restores a missing chapter i...)
(“Every point of view, every kind of knowledge and every k...)
(A new edition of the definitive book on the depression-er...)
(A new edition of the definitive book on the depression-er...)
(Edited by Robert Phillips.)
(Book by Schwartz, Delmore)
(Clear, precise, graceful...(Atlas') biographical style ma...)
In 1937, he married Gertrude Buckman, a book reviewer for Partisan Review, whom he divorced after six years.