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.

A propos de l’auteur

Lou Reed’s (b. 1942) most recent releases include Romanticism, a collection of photographs, and Lou Reed’s Berlin, the Julian Schnabel-filmed record of a multi-media performance of Reed’s iconic 1973 album. The guitarist and principal songwriter for The Velvet Underground, he has enjoyed a long and successful solo career. His book of photographs, New York, was published in 2008.