Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz
Author :
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages : 489
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780374722692
ISBN-13 : 0374722692
Rating : 4/5 (92 Downloads)

Synopsis Delmore Schwartz by : James Atlas

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet is based on interviews, letters, and an extraordinary collection of unpublished papers that had never before been examined.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. In 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.

Letters of Delmore Schwartz

Letters of Delmore Schwartz
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 424
Release :
ISBN-10 : UOM:39015008728142
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (42 Downloads)

Synopsis Letters of Delmore Schwartz by : Delmore Schwartz

Selected Poems (1938-1958)

Selected Poems (1938-1958)
Author :
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Total Pages : 244
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0811201910
ISBN-13 : 9780811201919
Rating : 4/5 (10 Downloads)

Synopsis Selected Poems (1938-1958) by : Delmore Schwartz

"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

Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz

Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz
Author :
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Total Pages : 305
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780811224338
ISBN-13 : 0811224333
Rating : 4/5 (38 Downloads)

Synopsis Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz by : Delmore Schwartz

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.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories
Author :
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Total Pages : 230
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0811206807
ISBN-13 : 9780811206808
Rating : 4/5 (07 Downloads)

Synopsis In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories by : Delmore Schwartz

Eight stories portray the world of the New York intellectual during the 1930s and 40s, probing the conflict between ambitious, educated youths and their immigrant parents.

Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin

Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin
Author :
Publisher : W W Norton & Company Incorporated
Total Pages : 382
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0393034712
ISBN-13 : 9780393034714
Rating : 4/5 (12 Downloads)

Synopsis Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin by : Delmore Schwartz

Selected letters depict the development of the friendship between Schwartz and Laughlin, a young publisher

The Ego is Always at the Wheel

The Ego is Always at the Wheel
Author :
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Total Pages : 164
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0811210286
ISBN-13 : 9780811210287
Rating : 4/5 (86 Downloads)

Synopsis The Ego is Always at the Wheel by : Delmore Schwartz

Drawn from the poet's collected papers at Yale University, these humorous essays touch on topics including taking baths and the meaning of existentialism, the abominations of the telephone, theories of Hamlet's behavior and Don Giovanni's promiscuity, and divorce.

Words in Air

Words in Air
Author :
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages : 1156
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780374722876
ISBN-13 : 0374722870
Rating : 4/5 (76 Downloads)

Synopsis Words in Air by : Elizabeth Bishop

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing—and often very funny—interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

The Shadow in the Garden

The Shadow in the Garden
Author :
Publisher : Vintage
Total Pages : 401
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781101871706
ISBN-13 : 1101871709
Rating : 4/5 (06 Downloads)

Synopsis The Shadow in the Garden by : James Atlas

The biographer—so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts—comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers’ lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers’ lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas’s professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know Atlas’s first subject, the “self-doomed” poet Delmore Schwartz. And we are introduced to a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the “tall pines,” as Mary McCarthy once called them, cut down now, according to Atlas, by the “merciless pruning of mortality”) and, of course, the elusive Bellow, “a metaphysician of the ordinary.” Atlas revisits the lives and works of the classical biographers, the Renaissance writers of what were then called “lives,” Samuel Johnson and the obsessive Boswell, and the Victorian masters Mrs. Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the biographers who hoped to glimpse an image of them—“as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd.” (With black-and-white illustrations throughout)