James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, 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, and many other journals. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and of a novel, The Great Pretender.
“A most accomplished performance, and a fascinating account of a
great American novelist.” —Michael Holroyd
“James Atlas is a model biographer. He writes with the
conversational ease of a born storyteller, giving us both a richly
informed history of one of America’s most original and gifted
writers and a mythos of the artist’s life in the twentieth century.
. . . As fascinating a portrait as any of Bellow’s arresting
fictional characters.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“Like a sparring partner, James Atlas enters the ring and weaves in
and out of Bellow’s extravagant life and extraordinary novels with
great dexterity.” —Michael Holroyd
Long promised and much postponed, this first major biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author proves to be well worth the wait. Atlas's vigorous and incisive portrait grows out of thorough research and intuitive understanding, yielding a sharp-edged provocative portrait. Born in 1915 in a small town near Montreal, Solomon (later Saul) Bellow, the youngest son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was nine years old when his family settled in Chicago. Capturing succinctly the drab but vital essence of the Jewish neighborhood of Humboldt Park, destined to be the touchstone of Bellow's fiction, Atlas charts Bellow's book-obsessed boyhood, his fraught relationships with his overbearing father and older brothers, and the death of his mother just after his graduation from high school. But when Bellow settles down seriously to become a writer, the biography finds its center. Atlas's depiction of Bellow's haphazard, self-absorbed personal life - his five marriages, his four children, his many lover, his wandering progress from Chicago to New York to Europe to various college campuses and back again - is tart yet sympathetic. He is at his best in describing Bellow's development as a writer and intellectual. Friendships and rivalries - with high school friend Isaac Rosenfeld, the Partisan Review crowd, Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago - and the polemics and passions of postwar literary America spur on the prolific Bellow. His first, more cerebral novels were followed by the sprawling, exuberant Adventures of Augie March, then by his three triumphant H-novels - Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift - among others. From here on in, the business of celebrity and the gradual narrowing of Bellow's vision occupy Atlas; he has a gimlet eye for the ravages of time and fame. This is an accomplished, compassionate but unsentimental life. Agent Jeff Posternak, Wylie Agency. 6-city author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
"A most accomplished performance, and a fascinating account of a
great American novelist." -Michael Holroyd
"James Atlas is a model biographer. He writes with the
conversational ease of a born storyteller, giving us both a richly
informed history of one of America's most original and gifted
writers and a mythos of the artist's life in the twentieth century.
. . . As fascinating a portrait as any of Bellow's arresting
fictional characters." -Joyce Carol Oates
"Like a sparring partner, James Atlas enters the ring and weaves in
and out of Bellow's extravagant life and extraordinary novels with
great dexterity." -Michael Holroyd
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