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.

Now with an exciting new preface by rock musician 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."

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

Elegant, powerful, and unique, this short story tells the tale of a young, nameless man who dreams he is in an old-fashioned movie theater in 1909. When he sits down to watch the film, he realizes that it documents his parents' courtship. Overcome by a sudden sadness--he knows the story will end in a loveless marriage filled with mutual recrimination--the protagonist shouts at the screen, desperately trying to interfere in his progenitors' romance, only to have the rest of the audience think him mad. All of Delmore Schwartz's narrative ability was crystallized in this, the most famous of his short stories.