As an artist, this passage is especially interesting:

"In the midst of Schwartz’s comics career he wrote The Blowtop, a novel that was credited by the New York Times as being the first consciously existential novel written in America. Written in 1946, it was inspired by his close relationships to such famous abstract expressionist painters as Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning and explored how the post-war years affected the bohemian class in New York’s Greenwich Village, where Schwartz grew up and lived. Due to its frank language and unflinching portrayal of drug use and sex, The Blowtop wasn’t published until 1948—and even then it was repackaged as a pulp mystery novel."

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