Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet
by James Atlas
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Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet is based on interviews, letters, and an extraordinary collection of unpublished papers that had never before been examined.Delmore Schwartz was only twenty-four in 1938 when his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was published.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 show more 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. show lessTags
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A thoroughly engrossing story about the real life person who inspired Saul Bellow to write Humboldt's Gift. Delmore was a tragic figure, a most promising writer and critic, who never quite lived up to his promise and , knowing this, ended up unhappy and unfulfilled.
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12+ Works 668 Members
James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series, a joint venture of Penguin and Lipper Books that he conceived around 1996 as he was struggling with his Bellow biography. His idea was to pair well-known writers and biographical subjects, with the books to be 150 pages or so, short for the genre. A longtime contributor show more to The New Yorker, he was an editor at The New York Times Magazine for many years. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Partisan Review, and many other journals. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for a National Book Award. James Atalas passed away on September 4, 2019 at the age of 70. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Awards and Honors
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Common Knowledge
- People/Characters
- Delmore Schwartz
Classifications
- Genres
- Biography & Memoir, Literature Studies and Criticism, Fiction and Literature, Poetry
- DDC/MDS
- 811.5 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American poetry 20th Century
- LCC
- PS3537 .C79 .Z56 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 1900-1960
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 108
- Popularity
- 299,501
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.58)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 3
