DELMORE SCHWARTZ: from his glorification as the golden boy of the American literary scene to his untimely death in 1966, alone and destitute. JAMES LAUGHLIN: founder of New Directions, publisher and editor of the modernists. This collection chronicles a correspondence that began with the poet's first unsolicited submission to New Directions in 1937, and continued throughout the tempestuous friendship that lasted until the poet's death. The relationship that developed between them was both literary, steeped in their own work and that of their contemporaries, and personal: gifted storytellers, they delighted each other with factual and fictional observations. The two remained friends and colleagues until the mental illness that eventually claimed him began to destroy Schwartz's ability to trust even those closest to him. Here follows the highs and lows of a relationship between two extraordinary personalities.

Delmore Schwartz became the voice of a new generation, when In Dreams Begin Responsibilities was published in the debut issue of 'Partisan Review' in 1937. The title story tells of an unnamed young man who has a dream that he is in an old-fashioned movie theatre in 1909. As he sits down to watch the film, he starts to realize that it is a motion picture documenting his parents' courtship. At turns he becomes engrossed, upset and outraged, in a story that set the stage for the arrival of an acclaimed literary voice.

With some changes in the contents-most notably the addition of sixteen recently discovered poems-Last & Lost Poems is a paperbound version of the highly praised 1979 Vanguard Press publication. That book disclosed that between 1958 and 1966, despite his disintegrating life, Delmore Schwartz was indeed working and producing poems full of the special magic that had propelled him early on into the literary limelight. Commenting on it, Richard Wilbur hailed Last & Lost Poems as "a valuable book... Schwartz sounds like no other voice in our time--rhapsodic yet philosophic; self-conscious; self-forgetting; unguarded; rejoicing or insisting on obligation to rejoice... Wonderfully free and energetic." "This posthumous collection will perhaps help to re-establish Delmore Schwartz as one of the major twentieth-century American poets." -John Ashbery "Delmore's genius survives in the sound of his words, in his hypnotizing lines." -Jonathan Galassi, The New York Review of Books "The greatest man I ever met." -Lou Reed