The World is a Wedding

Beige cloth boards with green lettering to spine. Small bookseller’s sticker to f.f.e. In unclipped, but rather shelf-worn dust jacket, with chips and tears to edges and some loss to spine ends and folds. (Please see photographs.) First printing. *** A collection of seven stories of various lengths, subtitled “Two Short Novels and Five Stories” on the dust jacket (but not on title page). When Delmore Schwartz (December 8, 1913 – July 11, 1966) started out in the late 1930s, he was seen by many as the future of serious literature and praised by luminaries such as T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. He never really fulfilled this promise, but this story collection shows what a talent he was. Schwartz is at his best when he writes about the bohemian scene in New York and the idle young men and failed artists in the 1930s en 40s America (reminiscent of Woody Allen). He is (somehow surprisingly) excellent on gender politics and this collection contains one of the best short stories of that period about race issues in America (“A Bitter Farce”). It also contains his classic story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”, which had been published previously. After his death Schwartz became an almost mythical figure, eulogized by Lou Reed (a former pupil of his), Bono (of course) and fictionalized as Von Humboldt Fleischer in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift.