Acknowledged by his biographer, James Atlas, as "one of the most self-conscious writers who ever lived," Schwartz saw his parents' choice of his first name as symbolic of their aspirations for acculturation, and he parodied what he felt was the oxymoronic linking of its establishment gentility to the immigrant identity revealed in the family's surname through personae as variously named as Shenandoah Fish.
The clashes which Schwartz believed his name embodied--between social aspirations and cultural values, old world civility and new world philistinism, and generational differences between immigrants and their American-born offspring--are the subject of much of his prose fiction and poetry.
All of Schwartz's writing attempts to evoke, analyze, and at times transcend what he saw as the inevitable disappointments and profound disillusionment which life forces on people. In 1934 Schwartz extended this paradigm to explain that his work attempts to describe "the values by which human beings exist (as distinct from their beliefs and explicit avowals of choice) and the tragic contrast between these values and the tragic environment in which they must be brought to fruition."
Growing up in Brooklyn, Schwartz decided early in life on his vocation as a poet, admitting that he hoped to win power and attention through such specialized mental and linguistic abilities.
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