Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet is based on interviews letters and an extraordinary collection of unpublished papers that had never before been examined. Delmore Schwartz was only twenty-four in 1938 when his first book In Dreams Begin Responsibilities was published. He received praise from T. S. Eliot Ezra Pound Allen Tate John Crowe Ransom Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. For Tate it was “the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Eliot and Pound.” A decade later the short-story collection The World Is a Wedding was published; many critics characterized it as the definitive portrait of their generation this biography the first about the man whom John Berryman called “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century” James Atlas traces Schwartz’s history from the arrival of his Romanian ancestors in New York to his youth in Washington Heights to his career at Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy and onward to the flowering of his generation in the ''40s when he and the critics poets and novelists who were his friends made their reputations. Schwartz’s brilliant satires of his friends and acquaintances his autobiographical stories and his letters to his illustrious peers contribute to this vivid portrait of an era―and of that era’s most trenchant chronicler.