Welcome to Litsy!

A new edition of the definitive book on the depression-era immigrant experience in New York City. 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.