Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz 1913-66, American poet, b. New York City, grad. New York Univ., 1935. He was an editor of the Partisan Review (1943-55). His first work, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, including the famous title story, appeared in 1938. Among his later writings are Shenandoah (1941), a verse play; Genesis (1943), a prose poem on the growth of a human being; World Is a Wedding (1948), a collection of short stories; Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems (1950); Summer Knowledge (1959); and Successful Love and Other Stories (1961). The tragic course of Schwartz's career, in which his early success was followed by a descent into alcoholism and madness, was the basis of Saul Bellow's novel, Humboldt's Gift (1975).

Bibliography: See his letters, ed. by R. Phillips (1985); biography by J. Atlas (1977); study by R. McDougall (1974).

Schwartz, Delmore (1913–66),Brooklynborn poet, critic, and teacher, graduated from New York University (1935), and was an editor of Partisan Review (1943–55). His books include In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938), poems; a translation of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (1939); Shenandoah (1941), a verse play; Genesis (1943), a tale in prose and poetry about the identity of an American Jew; Vaudeville for a Princess (1950), poems; Summer Knowledge (1959, Bollingen Prize), collecting the poems in his first volume, selecting some from other early books, and adding new works; and collections of stories, The World Is a Wedding (1948) and Successful Love (1961). His Last and Lost Poems was published in 1979 and a previously unpublished group of rather light prose sketches appeared as The Ego Is Always at the Wheel, issued in 1986. His correspondence with his publisher, Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, appeared in 1993. He was the model for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift.