The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale

by James Atlas

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. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas’s professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know Atlas’s first subject, the “self-doomed” poet Delmore Schwartz. 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. 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 image of them—“as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd.”

(With black-and-white illustrations throughout)

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Writing, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Autobiography, Literary Criticism

Audible Audio

First published August 22, 2017

About the author

James Robert Atlas was a writer, especially of biographies, as well as a publisher. He was the president of Atlas & Company, and founding editor of the Penguin Lives Series.
He was born in 1949 outside Chicago, and attended Harvard University, studying under Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop with the intention to become a poet. He later attended Oxford University and studied under Richard Ellmann as a prestigious Rhodes Scholar. Here, he decided that he wanted to become a biographer.

Reviews

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a memoir of a biographer, James Atlas, as he reminisces about his experiences writing two biographies -- of Delmore Schwartz, and of Saul Bellow. It's a meditation on the art of biography, with attention to some of the ethical quandaries facing biographers whose subjects have recently died or are still living. Is it prying to quote from correspondence? How should biographers handle situations when informants are embroiling them in conflicts with their subjects? Where is the line between just enough personal insight into a subject and too much information for comfort? And fittingly, it's also an exploration of Atlas's coming of age, and later of his grappling with aging -- his aging and that of his subjects and interviewees. Atlas also struggles with questions of his own identity, particularly in his interactions with Saul Bellow. Atlas is honest about his personal foibles and limitations, and clearly serious about the fascinations that biographies still hold for him, even while he addresses questions about their relative literary worth compared to the works of Schwartz and Bellow. An interesting and worthwhile read for anyone who loves reading contemporary biographies, and wants a sense of the work, intellectual, literary, historical, and psychological, that goes into writing them.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

My nonfiction book of the year. I read this in August, planning to contrast it with Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own, another biographer’s memoir, for the LARB. It would have been a brilliant article, believe me. But they didn’t bite, and by the time I approached the TLS they’d already arranged coverage of the books. Alas! Such is the life of a freelancer. Since then I’ve struggled to know what to say about Atlas’s book that would explain why I loved it so much that my paperback proof is riddled with Post-It flags.

Much more so than Tomalin, Atlas gave me a real sense of what it’s like to immerse yourself in another person’s life. He made it up as he went along: he was only 25 when he got the contract to write a biography of the poet Delmore Schwartz, who died a penniless alcoholic at age 52. Writing about the deceased was a whole different matter to engaging with a living figure, as Atlas did when he wrote his biography of Saul Bellow in the 1990s.

Atlas perceptively explores the connections between Schwartz and Bellow (Schwartz was the model for the protagonist of Bellow’s 1975 Pulitzer winner, Humboldt’s Gift) and between Bellow and himself (a Chicago upbringing with Russian Jewish immigrant ancestors), but also sets his work in the context of centuries of biographical achievement – from James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson through master biographers like Richard Holmes, Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann (Atlas’s supervisor during his fellowship at Oxford) to recent controversial biographies of Robert Frost and Vladimir Nabokov.

This book deals with the nitty-gritty of archival research and how technology has changed it; Atlas also talks story-telling strategies and the challenge of impartiality, and ponders how we look for the patterns in a life that might explain what, besides genius, accounts for a writer’s skill. Even the footnotes are illuminating, and from the notes I learned about a whole raft of biographies and books on the biographer’s trade that I’d like to read. After I finished reading it I spent a few days dreamily wondering if I might write a biography some day. For anyone remotely interested in life writing, pick this up with my highest recommendation.

[Nell Beaudry McLachlan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Mr. Atlas,

At the end of the book you say you are relegated to the ranks of those who will be not-biographied. I'd rather like to write yours. I generally don't read biographies, and very rarely memoirs, but picked yours up from the new titles at work on something of a whim. I liked the title (sorry, I realize it isn't yours), and the cover art was appealing (also, I realize, not yours). I think you're funny. You have a lovely, incisive way of writing that is at once informative and provides that emotional gut-punch that makes the reader want to hold the book very close to their chest. I feel for you. I'd like to sit across a table from you in a cafe and listen to your stories and reach out to squeeze your hand when you say something particularly funny or sad - I get the sense that there might be rather a few of those moments. I loved that as much as this was a story about your subjects, about meeting them and knowing them and wishing that you hadn't, but also about you. I wish there had been more of you in your book, because I think maybe you're a lot more likable than your subjects, whom I feel I got to know intimately through your eyes. I confess to not having read any work by Bellow, which is tragically unfortunate for a Montreal librarian in a Jewish library, let me tell you. You made me want to read his work (and I've already checked out our collection of Delmore's letters, our only work by or about him, excluding your biography).

In short, I think you're great. Feel free to write another memoir, any time. I'll put myself on hold for it as soon as I see it show up on your publisher's website.

[Elizabeth Horan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This addictive volume is full of great advice for biographers and includes many fine insights into the literary life of Chicago and New York City from the 1930s to the 1980s, although the hilarious, revealing, witty and wise notes and personal reflections are totally up to the minute. I literally could not put this book aside! With every chapter I wanted to know more about the author - tremendously well-read, a first-rate interviewer and immersed in the world of books and publishing - and what he did next. The chapters about his relationships with authors he has biographied, and more to the point, their families, friends, and acquaintances are utterly fascinating. Figures like Dwight MacDonald, Saul Bellow, Phillip Rahv, E. Wilson (and more) leap to the page because we meet them through their long-suffering, or loving, or exasperated family and friends. Also fascinating is what Atlas tells us about Boswell, and the numerous asides about how biography is bound to change in an age when no one writes letters but everyone texts. And more. This is a book to put alongside Edel’s, and Hamilton’s superb Keepers of the Flame. I did not want it to end.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delicious literary cake chock full of scrumptious lit bio bits ( mostly all dead white guys but there ya go on that aspect) . It’s a bio of biographies and biographers and autobio of writing bios ( author did one on delmore and one on bellow)
Has cool pictures , narrative bibliography n excellent index.

[Alex Kudera · Rating 5 out of 5]

At my blog, The Less United States of Kudera, I added several quotations from this book, but there are many more good ones to choose from. It's quite a comprehensive look at the art and practice of biography, both pro and con, with, of course, special emphasis on the writers Atlas wrote biographies of, Bellow and Schwartz.

[Jeimy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book about the lengths this biographer went to in order to gather information about his subject. I enjoyed his tales and those of other biographers’ quest to get as close to their subjects as possible, but there was something I found lacking.

[Cordelia Becker · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1974 twenty-five-year-old James Atlas signed a contract with Farrar, Straus & Giroux to write a biography of Delmore Schwartz. Delmore Schwartz was a wunderkind author and poet of his time and is well memorialized in Atlas’s biography and in the fiction of Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift”. Atlas began his research by going through a box of Schwartz’s papers that found their way to a Yale Library thanks to Dwight MacDonald. A letter at the top of the box is signed: T.S. Eliot. The next letter is signed “Wystan – W.H. Auden”.
Atlas writes

“I raced through its contents with the nervous fervor of an heir reading a will. Which in a sense I was. Only my inheritance would turn out to be, instead of worldly goods, the custodianship of an obscure poet whose unlikely name would resonate through my life like a mournful bell”.

Upon reading these opening passages of “The Shadow in the Garden” I wondered what frivolities occupied my time when I was twenty-five and I thought James Atlas must have been a remarkable young man. His biography of Delmore Schwartz was published in 1977 and was nominated for the National Book Award. I think at that point my biggest triumph was having recorded every single episode of “Star Trek” reruns on my VCR.
This book combines Atlas’s memories of being a biographer and tons of fascinating information about biographers and their subjects. My favorite being about Boswell and Johnson. The part of the book that made me uneasy was the relationship between Atlas and Saul Bellow. In some way, it was almost as if the two men were just pretending to like each other. It is no surprise to me, that Atlas’s “Bellow” came out with mixed reviews – some calling it muck-racking others lauding it. Time will tell if it holds up.
A quote from the book as Atlas’s is musing over the fact that Bellow doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in Atlas’s life.

“Most of the time I didn’t mind our unequal stature and talents: Go, you be the genius. But sometimes I felt: What about my life? Doesn’t it count, too? There comes, inevitably, a moment of rebellion, when the inequality begins to chafe. Biographers are people, too, even if we’re condemned to huddle in the shadow of our subjects’ monumentality. ... A thousand pages along, a decade in, the biographer cries out: What am I? Chopped liver?
Yes. That’s what you signed on to be, and that’s what you are. Deal with it”.

I have learned so much from this book about biography, about our literary heritage and authors and editors whose names I’ve heard but really didn’t know much about. James Atlas is a good writer and I highly recommend “The Shadow in the Garden”
For me, this book is a master class in the art of biography. I was listening to it on audio but there were so many interesting references I had to purchase the hard copy so I could go crazy underlining and highlighting and, of course, doing internet searches on all the authors, scholars and biographers James Atlas references. It is well written, accessible and chock full of information. James Atlas

[David Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Atlas’s The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale is a wonderful, amicable read — one of those books that keep you turning pages, ready for the next delectable anecdote, sharp observation, or occasional revelation.

The young Delmore Schwartz, writing in his journal: “Snubbed by waitress, consoled by sandwiches.”

Virginia Woolf, in a letter to her sister Vanessa: “Oh I’m so furious! Just as we’d cleared off our weekend visits, the telephone rings, and there comes to lunch late, hungry yet eating with the deliberation and mastication of a Toad, Mr. Gillies of the Labour Party. It’s 5:30. He’s still there, masticating.”

A hand-lettered sign on the screen door of Jean Stafford’s (Robert Lowell’s ex-wife) house: “Use of the word ‘hopefully’ not permitted on these premises.”

Shortly after his biography of Delmore Schwartz was published, the 28-year-old Atlas moved to New York to take a job at Time magazine:

“My tenure at Time was ignominious. I was a ‘floater,’ assigned each week to whatever section of the magazine was short-handed. Often it was Milestones, the page that recorded the deaths of famous people or significant — usually malign — events in their lives, such as divorces or prison convictions or spectacular financial crises. In the next cubicle sat Michiko Kakutani, chain-smoking unfiltered Camels as she turned out fast-breaking stories with a machine-gun clack of typewriter keys. Who could have predicted that within a decade she would land the job of daily book reviewer for The New York Times and become the most feared critic in America?”

Now we know that.

I had not read anywhere before, or perhaps had forgotten, that Saul Bellow regarded his first two novels, Dangling Man and the Victim as “his M.A. and Ph.D.”

In reviewing Bellow’s The Dean’s December, John Updike wrote: “Literature can do with any amount of egotism, but the merest pinch of narcissism spoils the broth.”

Biographer Atlas having dinner with Bellow: “The subject of Isaac Rosenfeld came up, and Bellow remarked that perhaps Rosenfeld had been jealous because Bellow got a Guggenheim first. But he didn’t. He got his Guggeheim the year after Rosenfeld. I had copies of their exchanges with the foundation. What was I supposed to do? Correct him? No, you’re mistaken, Mr. Bellow. In fact, your lifelong rival beat you to it.

”I maintained my usual psychiatric silence.”

Atlas at lunch with Bellow’s son Adam, when Saul is in his seventies: “Bellow had been writing a long, ambitious novel called The Case for Love but had put it aside. ‘It’s too late for him to write a big book now,’ Adam said. ‘The rigging can’t weather the storm.’ ”

And here’s a favorite I was pleased to add to my awareness, from a public appearance by Bellow at New York’s 92nd Street Hebrew Y late in his life:

“He told a funny story about Isaac Bashevis Singer. A friend of Bellow’s had once picked up Singer at the airport for a reading, and Singer has asked him to pose a question that night about ‘the parallels between Singer’s work and Chagall’s.’


“Dutifully, Bellow’s friend stood up after the reading and asked: “Are there any parallels between your work and Chagall’s?’

“Singer: ‘What a stupid question.’

“A great roar of laughter erupted from the audience.”

One of the most movingly remembered and recorded passages in the book comes when Atlas in his thirties meets up with Lola Szladits, the “petite, elegantly coiffed woman in her sixties,” a Hungarian refugee, who was the curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. I really can’t pull something to quote from this passage. You need to encounter it for yourself on pages 182-183.

As a visual bonus, on page 94 you get a probably 1970s photo of Saul Bellow wearing a grotesque mile-wide tie of the period.

Do not skip the notes at the back of the book, including a note on chapter XII that I do not quote because amazon.com would surely censor it.

I would like to file an amicus brief with amazon.com reader-reviewer Henry Cohen’s complaint about the unfortunate treatment of footnotes, for which the publisher, not Atlas, is to be faulted.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Atlas has written acclaimed biographies of two remarkably different American literary legends: the first, “Delmore Schwartz”, published in 1977, recounts the short, tragic life of an American poet who achieved fame in the 1930s but had almost entirely faded from view by the time of his early death in 1966; the second, “Bellow: A Biography”, published in 2000, chronicled the long, tumultuous life of one of Schwartz’s contemporaries, Saul Bellow, the much-honored American novelist who first achieved his fame in the 1950s, a fame (and later notoriety) that continued to burn brightly for the next fifty years, right up to his death just short of age 90 in 2005, five years after Atlas’ book ends.

Now, in “The Shadow in the Garden”, Atlas turns his biographer’s skills inward, upon himself, and fortunately for readers who have enjoyed those two biographies (reviewer’s disclaimer – I myself have not read “Delmore Schwartz”, but I have indeed read, and relished, “Bellow: A Biography”), Atlas turns out to be every bit as engaging a subject as he is an author.

In fact, what is most engaging about this memoir is how skillfully Atlas, while telling his own story as the biographer first of Schwartz and then of Bellow, keeps himself in the title’s “shadow” – a reference both to the biographer’s assigned role of shadowing their subject, and to a not very charitable description of the profession, offered up by the often-cantankerous Bellow, as “the shadow on the tombstone in the garden”. While the book is very much a memoir of his own life, its focus consistently shifts to the subjects of Atlas’ two biographies, to the brilliant scholars who taught and mentored him (among them Richard Ellmann, Richard Holmes, Dwight Macdonald, and Alfred Kazin), and to his literary predecessors (James Boswell, Thomas Carlyle, Plutarch, and a host of others, some well-known, some little known, and some all but unknown – Atlas seems to have read every literary biography ever published, as well as quite a few left, perhaps deservedly, unpublished).

In the end, the book succeeds – and delights – on three distinct levels. Most rewardingly, it serves as a kind of coda to Atlas’ two published biographies, as he takes a second look at both Schwartz and Bellow. The passage of time seems to have enlarged rather than diminished the place they each hold in their biographer’s memory, which has allowed Atlas to paint what struck me (at least in Bellow’s case) as a deeper, more informed, and more enlightening portrait than he was able to capture from the closer perspective of the actual biography.

In an entirely different way, it also functions as a thoroughly satisfying survey course in what some might consider the golden age of American literature, from the 1930s through the end of the twentieth century, as Atlas writes insightfully not just about the works of Schwartz and Bellow, but about those of their many gifted, if not always so successful, contemporaries.

And finally, it fulfills the very purpose for which it was written – as a memoir of a life lived dedicated to the pursuit of, and love for, literature. As noted in the second paragraph above, Atlas proves to be as keen an observer of himself as he is of his subjects. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where the footnotes are as entertaining, and informative, as these are. It’s in the footnotes that Atlas permits himself to step out from the shadows and share his personal reflections on what he’s writing about in the main text. The person who reveals himself here – a person possessing a keen sense of humor, a constant intellectual curiosity, and a hard-won grasp of the limits of what any of us can ever really know about another person – would no doubt be a pleasure to meet, not just in these footnotes, but in real life as well.

For now, however, meeting James Atlas in the pages of this memoir is pleasure enough.

[Howard Cincotta · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Atlas has chosen the hard road of literary biography, and here he contemplates its high costs and ample rewards in a gentle, beautifully written book. Atlas, the biographer of poet Delmore Schwartz and novelist Saul Bellow, draws a series of vivid, utterly fascinating portraits of a mid-20th century literary generation, including such notable critics and writers as Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, and Dwight MacDonald. These literary lions — many Jewish, almost all New Yorkers — once ruled the world of American letters, but most, like Philip Rahv, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Allan Bloom, have faded and become largely forgotten.

This slice of 20th-century American literary life is amply rewarding, but Atlas ranges much farther afield to examine the complicated, often fraught relationship between biographer and subject throughout history. He also ponders the endlessly knotty questions of facts, truth, context, and how a biographer must shape the chaos of a human life into a comprehensible narrative.

Atlas, a prolific literary journalist and reviewer, began his book career with a biography of the brilliant, if self-destructive poet and writer Delmore Schwartz. Delmore was already dead when Atlas began his work; not so Saul Bellow, whom Atlas grew to know all too well. Atlas’s portrayal of the irascible, moody, brilliant, wary Bellow is riveting, as is his account of years of negotiation over releasing letters and alternately answering and parrying Atlas’s interview questions. (Imagine cross-examining Bellow about his four previous wives and numerous girlfriends, with his fifth wife present in the house.)

But woven through the Delmore and Bellow accounts are stories of other biographies and biographers. They range from Plutarch — with his distinctly unmodern regard for so-called facts — to the magisterial biographies of Shelley, Henry James, and James Joyce by, respectively, Richard Holmes, Leon Edel, and Richard Ellmann (Atlas’s tutor at Oxford). Atlas also devotes many delightful pages to the most celebrated biographer-writer relationship in English literature: James Boswell and Samuel Johnson. Boswell may not be a model biographer or human being, but Atlas clearly regards him with deep affection.

Many, if not most of these biographer-writer encounters do not end in the kind of deep friendship that Johnson and Boswell enjoyed, or the mutual respect, if careful distance, that Atlas and Bellow experienced. Some biographers, such as those for Graham Greene and Robert Frost, grew to detest their subjects, just as Vladimir Nabokov, quite predictably, raged against his first biographer, Andrew Field.

In the end, maybe the biographer is better off with a long-dead subject, like Richard Holmes on Shelley and Coleridge, even if you have to forgo the personal interviews.

Atlas concludes with an account of himself going through and throwing out old letters and manuscripts, musing about the evanescence of writing, books, and literary reputations. Fair enough. But Saul Bellow and Bellow’s biography will survive, I suspect. So should this wonderful book.

[ReadingwhileWalking · Rating 5 out of 5]

A behind-the-scenes account of how veteran biographer James Atlas wrote his major studies of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, taking up, respectively, three and eleven years of his life. The massive amount of invisible work a serious biographer has to undertake is phenomenal and this book is of great comfort, I am sure, to anyone currently embroiled in a similar undertaking; though also somewhat intimidating in the chronicling of how much digging and diligent recording needs to be done in order to come up with what is necessarily a subjective 'version' of a life. The final chapters on what happens after a book's publication are especially fascinating with their stories of new discoveries, what was missed, what was gained and inevitable regrets.

The Shadow in the Garden (a corruption of a phrase by Henry James) doubles as a history of biographers and their subjects including Johnson/Boswell, Charlotte Bronte/Mrs Gaskell and Carlyle/Froude. This is a good way into examining the often fraught relationship between the biographer and biographee/his/her family. 'We're there and not there, visible and invisible; our fingers leave faint but indelible prints. Our temperament, our character, our sensibility all become part of the story we're telling. We strive for objectivity, aware that it can't be achieved,' says Atlas of the biographer within the text.

This is true of his own position within this memoir. He hangs back, lurks around the corner, doesn't go in for much auto-analysis, reveals little of his personal life (or character). We know he has a wife called Anna and some children whose upbringing he seems quite involved with; but they never become personalities in his text. (Contrast this with Robert Caro's wife, Ina, who is very much his partner on their joint voyage of biographical discovery). Also, this is very much a white man's view of biography. In fact a white Jewish man's view of biography. Even a white American Jewish man's view. As Atlas says, character, temperament, sensibility all become part of the story. But whatever the reader's perspective, there is much to be gleaned from this multi-layered text, which turned out to be James Atlas's final testimony. He died two years after its publication in 2019.

[Nathan Hobby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Atlas wrote one biography about a dead poet, Delmore Schwartz, and one about a (then) living novelist, Saul Bellow. He recounts the first as a biographical quest, in the tragic footsteps of a talented man brought down by alcohol and self-sabotage. He writes beautifully of his memories of interviewing a dying generation of Schwartz’s friends – all of them fascinating characters – in the 1970s. ‘[T]he sad story of his later years—the squandered talent, the mental suffering, the chaos of his life—weighed on me, and perhaps I judged him the way we tend to judge those closest to us: harshly.’ (loc. 2612) The long years of his Bellow biography are very different, a twisting psychological game – unequal friendship? adopted father-son? – with a celebrity writer who always seems a little dangerous and frightening.

Full review: https://nathanhobby.com/2019/04/19/th...

[Vivian Bookmark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall great. My only hesitation is the racier—well, frankly racist content. In the grand scheme they're perturbing blips, but it's frustrating to be reminded no matter where I go, no matter how I live or breathe there will always be racists and, in the case of this author, their defenders; Yakubian ghosts who can never countenance the idea they are, in fact, unremarkable and boring like the rest of us and who protest any movement we make. We make our own canon they complain. We interpret their canon in our way, they complain. We don't interact with their canon they complain, and the entire time they stare at us stupified when we vocalize our frustrations and become even more bewildered the further we recede from and distrust them.
Again, it's a great and charming book, but for any other minority glancing at this, beware of this. I can barely stomach that bullshit, I can't really imagine more ordinary folks being able to withstand it.

[Jacqueline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book illuminated the struggle of writing biography for me and made me ponder many things about one's individual legacy. It also reminded me that culture wars and disagreements between writers are not a phenomenon of only this era. James Atlas was the biographer of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz. In this memoir, he recalls the years he spent researching these authors.

Favorite Quotes
p. 311 "One of the great tragedies of human life is that you have to get off the stage before you've gotten it right, and leave those cracked notes forever lingering."

p. 314 "no man lives without jostling and being jostled;"

p. 333 For Bellow, "The writing was the living."

[JMM · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never read anything quite like this memoir. It’s an examination of the author’s life as a biographer and writer, offering a detailed account of the complicated process of getting to know both dead subjects (Delmore Schwartz) and living ones (Saul Bellow). Along the way, Atlas explores the lives and works of other biographers, from Boswell on, and their relationships with often-difficult luminaries. It is rich, fascinating, humorous, enlightening. I’m grateful to Atlas for taking me on this journey and for bringing to life so many important writers of the previous century.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I can't imagine much of an audience for this book, but I am that audience. And I liked this, but the author's description of writing a biography of someone that he didn't particularly like as a person was actually a little depressing. It reminded me of reading Blake Bailey's bio of Cheever.

[Mark Burris · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent memoir, but so much more. Atlas's two big biographies—of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow—serve as the organizing principle for this book, but along the way we learn not only about the authors but also what makes biography such a wonderful way to absorb history. Even more, we get a kind of autobiography of the biographer. Fascinating life and a wonderful read.

[Julia Nock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Atlas, the biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow lives his own biography in the process, along with an entertaining history of biography and biographers.

[Nicole Marble · Rating 2 out of 5]

A professional biographer talks about being a professional biographer. Full of detail - way too much detail for me.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

hunger for research
lightening the load of biography editorship--

[JW · Rating 5 out of 5]

A biography by a biographer that's an autobiography about biography.

Also the best book on the craft I've ever read.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally engrossed by this memoir and rumination on writing biographies. I love books that lead me to other books and writers, and this one for sure will fatten my shelves.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atlas examines what it takes to research and write a biography, and he should know, having produced works about a dead writer (Delmore Schwartz) and a live one (Saul Bellow), the latter taking longer and creating many more obstacles. Interspersed between the tale of his own highs and lows in pursuit of Bellow, a towering literary figure crippled by massive ego needs and equally massive paranoia, Atlas delivers a wonderful review of the history of biographies and biographers down through the ages, with appropriate emphasis on Boswell/Johnson, ground that has been tilled often, and many less-told stories of the peculiar obsessions and processes required to produce an engaging biography -- not to mention the impact after publication by the subjects and others with a stake in the life of the Great Ones. I found the whole book quite engaging, in part because I went through my own Bellow worship (like most English majors), and because it gave me greater respect for the many skills required to uncover and verify the truth, or at least one version thereof.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best nonfiction 2017 publishers weekly

I love books about the process of writing. Lots of references to ‘fine’ biographies which I added to my ‘to read’ list. Some comment on his experiences of writing two biographies Delmore + Saul Bellow. Self indulgent whiny tone at times: why do subjects of biographies fade in importance, is it all a waste of time, and more to the point why doesn’t someone write a biog about me.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating account of the experiences of one biographer, yet it could stand in for anyone who has ever attempted to capture the life story of another person.

[Paul Wilner]

Superb, erudite but not show-offy. Confessional in a way that is not self-serving. This autobiographical exercise in biography is better than his biographies (though his Delmore Schwartz book is still state of the art). It goes a long way to explain why his experience with the ghost of Delmore was more positive than the real life encounters with Mr. Bellow.
Highly recommended, with delicious diversions into Boswell, Johnson and other distinguished predecessors.