In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories collects eight of Delmore Schwartz's finest delineations of New York intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. As no other writer, he captures the speech, generational conflicts, the mocking self-analysis of educated, ambitious, Depression-stymied young people at odds with their immigrant parents. This unique American dilemma Irving Howe describes in his penetrating, loving foreward 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."

James Atlas, author of a biography of Schwartz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), has provided an introduction placing the stories (many barely disguised autobiography) in their historical and cultural setting. This edition presents Schwartz to a new generation of American readers, drifting further away from their immigrant roots and anxious to reestablish contact with on the the many worlds of our fathers.