SOURCE: "Reconsidering Delmore Schwartz," in Prooftext, Vol. 5, No. 3, September, 1985, pp. 245-62.

In the following essay, New examines Schwartz's fiction in the larger context of American and Jewish-American literature.

Philip Rahv on Schwartz's Fiction:

It cannot be said of Schwartz that he was a born writer of fiction. He was not endowed with the capacity to create a solid fictional world seemingly self-governing in structure and possessed of an energy supple enough to establish a necessary congruity between interior and external event and circumstance. In Schwartz's narratives the best writing (and effects) is mostly achieved in lyrical moments and in passages embodying the emotional and intellectual pathos of self-recognition or self-identification.

Philip Rahv, in his Essays on Literature and Politics: 1932–1972, Houghton Mifflin, 1978.

If Jewish-American literature is not entirely at home in Jewish literary history, this is probably because it has so thoroughly learned and integrated the homelessness endemic to...