The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.53 (649 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1101871695 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 400 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-06-05 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
He lives in New York City.. JAMES ATLAS is the author of Bellow: A Biography; Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (nominated for the National Book Award); and the memoir My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale. The founder of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives series, Atlas was for many years an editor at The New York Times
This excellent memoir may make you think twice about writing a life—i.e., subsuming your own to it—but it will inspire you to rush out to read one.” —Judith Thurman, author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. “A work of both depth and radiance Expert, provocative, and enlightening Atlas relays all with wry hilarity, bighearted candor, and effervescent passion for the art of literary biography.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)“In recounting a life largely subsumed by the lives of others, James Atlas reveals, with sincerity, humor, and in
And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the biographers who hoped to glimpse an image of them—“as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd.”(With black-and-white illustrations throughout). And we are introduced to a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the “tall pines,” as Mary McCarthy once called them, cut down now, according to Atlas, by the “merciless pruning of mortality”) and, of course, the elusive Bellow, “a metaphysician of the ordinary.” Atlas revisits the lives and works of the classical biographers, the Renaissance writers of what were then called “lives,” Samuel Johnson and the obsessive Boswell, and the Victorian masters Mrs. We get to know Atlas’s first subject, the “self-doomed” poet Delmore Schwartz