Delmore Schwartz  Delmore Schwartz (December 8, 1913 – July 11, 1966) was an American poet and short story writer. Schwartz was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, where he also grew up. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him. He had a younger brother, Kenneth. In 1930, Schwartz's father suddenly died at the age of 49. Though Harry had accumulated a good deal of wealth from his dealings in the real estate business, Delmore inherited only a small amount of that money as the result of the shady dealings of the executor of Harry's estate. According to Schwartz's biographer, James Atlas, "Delmore continued to hope that he would eventually receive his legacy [even] as late as 1946." Schwartz spent time at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin before graduating with a B.A. from New York University in 1935. He then did some graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University, where he studied with the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, but left and returned to New York without receiving a degree. In 1937, he married Gertrude Buckman, a book reviewer for "Partisan Review", whom he divorced after six years. Soon thereafter, he made his parents' disastrous marriage the subject of his most famous short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities", which was published in 1937 in the first issue of "Partisan Review". This story and other short stories and poems became his first book, also titled "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities", published in 1938 when Schwartz was only 25 years old. The book was well received, and made him a well-known figure in New York intellectual circles. His work received praise from some of the most respected people in literature, including T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound, and Schwartz was considered one of the most gifted and promising young writers of his generation. According to James Atlas, Allen Tate responded to the book by stating that "[Schwartz's] poetic style marked 'the first real innovation we've had since Eliot and Pound.'" For the next couple of decades, he continued to publish stories, poems, plays, and essays, and edited the "Partisan Review" from 1943 to 1955, as well as "The New Republic". Schwartz was deeply upset when his epic poem, "Genesis", which he published in 1943 and hoped would stand alongside other Modernist epics like "The Waste Land" and "The Cantos" as a masterpiece, received a negative critical response.