The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.86 (648 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B01NAC6ZIX |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 446 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-09-08 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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. 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’ live get documented. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas’s professor during a transformative year at Oxford. Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the biographers who hoped to glimpse an imag
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
“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 incisiveness, the value and the difficulty of looking outside oneself for meaning. There is now.” —Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra: A Life “Oh God, Atlas has given it all away: all the trade secrets, anxieties, ploys, scruples, and obsessions of the literary biographer, the noble and ignoble inner workings of the craft, along with an enthralling hist