From Library Journal
LJ's reviewer dubbed this portrait of the artist a "readable, gossipy case study" (LJ 11/15/77). It follows Schwartz's life and career from his early writing, which showed great promise, to his death at age 52. A few of his poetry and story collections remain in print, but Schwartz has become an obscure figure of literature, making this more for academic collections. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With the appearance in 1938 of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, twenty-four-year-old Delmore Schwartz was immediately recognized as a genuinely innovative force in American letters, drawing 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 his book of short stories. The World Is A Wedding, was characterized by many critics as the definitive portrait of their generation. Yet Schwartz's early promise was followed by a tragic decline and finally death in a midtown Manhattan hotel at the age of fifty-two.

At the height of his fame, Schwartz proclaimed himself "the poet of the Atlantic migration that made America." Schwartz was an integral member of a circle of critics, poets, and novelists that included John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Saul Bellow, who later memorialized his friend as the doomed poet Von Humbolt Fleisher in Humbolt's Gift. Drawing on interviews, an extraordinary collection of previously unpublished papers, Schwartz's brilliant satires of his friends and acquaintances, and his letters to Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and many others, James Atlas creates a vivid portrait of Schwartz and brings to life the vital literary milieu of America in the thirties and forties.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

LJ's reviewer dubbed this portrait of the artist a "readable, gossipy case study" (LJ 11/15/77). It follows Schwartz's life and career from his early writing, which showed great promise, to his death at age 52. A few of his poetry and story collections remain in print, but Schwartz has become an obscure figure of literature, making this more for academic collections. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Charles McGrath - The New York Times Books of the Century

....In a style clear, precise and graceful this book reads with the pleasure of a good novel.

Leonard Michaels - The New York Times Book Review

Clear, precise, graceful￯﾿ﾽ[Atlas's] biographical style makes the book read with the pleasure of a good novel.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING