The slyly clever stories that Schwartz wrote, as well as his rueful, contemplative poems, can leave some readers cold. These stories and poems are associated with the span of influence enjoyed by "the New York intellectuals" from 1937 to, say, 1960, an influence deriving from a special blend of opinion and sensibility: anti-Stalinist left, aggressively modernist, brashly high-brow, freeswinging cosmopolitan, uneasily Jewish. All in all, this adds up to a pretty stiff dose for certain kinds of American literary people. Especially stiff for the academic "traditionalists" straining for Anglo-Saxon attitude and the anti-academic redskins declaring themselves just folks. The New York sensibility had its moment, and that moment is over….

[Embarrasment] regarding his cultural sources, his literary role, his large, awkward body is one of the persistent motifs in his work….

When his remarkable story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" first appeared in Partisan Review …, they read it with delight persuaded that no previous American writer had caught so well the emotional costs of immigrant Jewish life. All the wordless griefs that the second generation felt about parents with whom its ties had been cut seemed to come pouring out in this story about a delusional courtship—and pouring out as art, not mere outcry….

He became famous for his bumbling, erudite, impassioned flow of speech, bringing together mother-wit from ancestral sources and literary sophistication from European capitals…. He soon became part of the mythology of a literary-intellectual generation, and naturally enough, once the next generation came along, it did not hesitate to stress that the myth had partly been based on misapprehensions….

Schwartz's literary ambitions, like the ambitions of an entire immigrant generation, brought together purity and craftiness, a love for the thing itself and an eye for the main chance. (p. 458)

[Schwartz left a] small body of work, not the sort that even intense admirers would claim to be "major", yet rich in the flavours of New York life, marked by a strong ironic intelligence, and in its sum making a difference in one's perception of things.

There are five or six first-rate stories, notably "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities", "America! America!", and "The Child is the Meaning of This Life". These deal with the comic pathos and hopelessness of the conflict between immigrant families and emancipated children, and the occasional recognition by the latter that they have left behind not only ghetto parochialism but a culture of value. Wry, depressed, insidiously ratiocinative, these stories have little visible plot but much entanglement of characters, stylized dialogue replacing action, and a major dependence on passages of commentary, deflated epigrams, and skittish ventures into moral rhetoric. There is a strong awareness of the sheer foolishness of human affairs, the radical ineptitude of our being, such as reminds one a bit of Dostoevsky's use of buffoonery. But there is also something rare in contemporary writing, and that is a shy aspiration towards spiritual goodness and nobility—perhaps an echo of immigrant voices….

[Schwartz's verse] is flecked with humour, graced with modesty. At their best, these poems are both serious and funny on a high level of intellectual consciousness, bringing together declamation, lyric introspectiveness, and bits of vaudeville. (p. 459)