Now with an exciting new preface by 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.

Autorentext

Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) was born and raised in Brooklyn. One of America's greatest poets and short-story writers, Schwartz contributed "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" to the first issue of Partisan Review in 1937. Schwartz taught at Syracuse, Princeton, and Kenyon College, and received the Bollingen Prize in 1959. After a difficult period of alchoholism and depression, he died of a heart attack in 1966.