The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.97 (585 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B01NAC6ZIX |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 178 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-03-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
He lives in New York City.. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and other journals. 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 Survi
With candor, subtle insight, and almost heartbreaking humility, he narrates his pursuit of the deceased Delmore Schwartz and the often forbiddingly alive Saul Bellow, laying bare both the pitfalls and rewards of biography. Writing of and around his books, Atlas triumphantly returns that fugitive figure—part sleuth, part scholar, part analyst, part medium, an emissary between worlds—to the page. “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 recounti
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 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 sub