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.