Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

James Atlas

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet was a National Book Award Finalist. This biography of the celebrated and castigated New York poet is "a balanced account of a notoriously unbalanced life." A child of Romanian Jewish immigrants whose marriage was tumultuous and short-lived, Delmore Schwartz began publishing poetry in his early twenties—and received praise from such luminaries as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. John Berryman referred to him as "the most underrated poet of the twentieth century." Ambitious, talented, and troubled, Schwartz was an icon of the 1940s literary scene with a remarkable knack for getting attention. Yet he spent his last days alone at New York's Chelsea Hotel, where he died of a heart attack at fifty-two, and it took two days for his body to be identified. This extraordinary biography—drawing on interviews with those who knew him, letters, and unpublished papers—tells the story of this American poet, his family, his education at Harvard, where he felt like an outsider, his illustrious circle of literary friends, and his painful decline, as well as assessing the body of work that keeps him alive in memory today.