Harvey Shapiro's precise, understated lyrics have garnered praise in the US, the UK, and in Israel. His early poems, hailed by The Nation as some of the best poems of our generation, were notable in part because they gave new form to Jewish immigrant experience. This collection presents the best work from Shapiro's early books, including the classic poems Battle Report on World War II and National Cold Storage Company on the death of John Kennedy, and a wealth of new poems, more sensual, but no less wry. Shapiro sees life itself as a state of exile, and writes of the spaces where for a...

With this masterly and original work, Bellow: A Biography, National Book Award nominee James Atlas gives the first definitive account of the Nobel Prize-winning author's turbulent personal and professional life, as it unfolded against the background of twentieth-century events--the Depression, World War II, the upheavals of the sixties--and amid all the complexities of the Jewish-immigrant experience in America, which generated a vibrant new literature.
Drawing upon a vast body of original research, including Bellow's extensive correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz,...

Now with an exciting new preface by rock musician 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...