SOURCE: "Delmore Schwartz's America," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring, 1982, pp. 151-55.

Saposnik is an American educator and critic who specializes in Jewish-American literature. In the following essay, he discusses Schwartz's treatment of Jewish-American identity in his fiction and poetry.

Of all his contemporaries among the New York intellectuals—those who, as Wallace Markfield puts it, used to run with the Trilling bunch—none was seemingly more bothered by his Jewish-American identity than Delmore Schwartz. While he himself would sometimes joke about his origins—"I am of Russian-Jewish distraction"—others among his friends described his neurosis and eventual paranoia as "obsession" (Dwight Macdonald) and "anguish" (William Barrett) [Dwight Macdonald in "Delmore Schwartz: 1913–1966" from Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker, 1970; William Barrett in "Delmore: A 30's Friendship and Beyond," Commentary 58, No. 3 (September 1974)]. However variable the symptom, the cause remained...