Showing results by author "James Atlas" in All Categories

To most audiences, Philip Roth is a literary icon, author of probing, provocative works like American Pastoral, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Goodbye, Columbus. But to James Atlas, Philip Roth was more than just a writer—he was a friend. In 1977, when he was 28, James Atlas published his first book, a biography of the poet Delmore Schwartz, and was stunned to receive a congratulatory letter from Philip Roth. He had been moved by the tragic story it told.

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet is based on interviews, letters, and an extraordinary collection of unpublished papers that had never before been examined. Delmore Schwartz was only 24 in 1938 when his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was published. He received praise from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our 40s and 50s, the period now generously known as middle age. It's both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover, for better and worse, who we are.

Symphony Space invited three renowned biographers, James Atlas, Edmund Morris, and Stacy Schiff, to reveal the fascinating, all-absorbing process of researching and writing another person's life story. The conversation delved deeply into the challenges the authors encountered and the pleasures they enjoyed in writing the lives of Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, Vera Nabakov, and Saul Bellow, as well as the difficulty of getting past the "unreliable narrator".

The biographer - so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts - comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers' lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers' lives.