America! America!

The American poet and short-story writer Delmore Schwartz was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Romanian Jewish immigrants and studied philosophy at New York University. His most famous short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” was published in 1937 in the first issue of the Partisan Review. This and other short stories and poems became his first book, published in 1938 when Schwartz was twenty-five years old. His work received praise from renowned literary figures including T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. He was the youngest poet ever to be awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1960). Although plagued by mental illness and alcoholism, he continued to publish stories, poems, plays, and essays, and he edited the Partisan Review from 1943 to 1955 and The New Republic from 1955 to 1957.