The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale
by James Atlas
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"The biographer's autobiography: a funny, endearing tale of how writers' lives get documented, by the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz. The biographer--so often in the shadows, kibbitzing, casting doubt, proving facts--here comes to the stage. James Atlas takes us back to his childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers' lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James show more Joyce and Atlas's professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know the author's first subject, the "self-doomed" poet Delmore Schwartz; a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the "tall trees," as Mary McCarthy described them, cut down now, Atlas writes, by the "merciless pruning of mortality"); and, of course, the elusive Bellow, "a metaphysician of the ordinary." Atlas revisits the lives and work of the classical biographers: the Renaissance writers of what were then called "lives," Samuel Johnson and the "meshugenah" Boswell, among them. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the luminaries of contemporary literature and the labor of those who hope to catch a glimpse of one of them--"as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd.""-- show lessTags
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12+ Works 670 Members
James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series, a joint venture of Penguin and Lipper Books that he conceived around 1996 as he was struggling with his Bellow biography. His idea was to pair well-known writers and biographical subjects, with the books to be 150 pages or so, short for the genre. A longtime contributor show more to The New Yorker, he was an editor at The New York Times Magazine for many years. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Partisan Review, and many other journals. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for a National Book Award. James Atalas passed away on September 4, 2019 at the age of 70. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir, Literature Studies and Criticism, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 920.073 — History & geography Biographies, Genealogy, Healdry Biographies General and collective by localities Of North America Famous Americans
- LCC
- CT34 .U6 .A85 — Auxiliary Sciences of History Biography Biography History of biographical literature. Lives of biographers
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 63
- Popularity
- 492,287
- Rating
- (4.25)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 2
