July 3, 2017
Atlas (My Life in the Middle Ages), a biographer and longtime contributor to the New Yorker, illuminates the art of writing a biography in this witty, conscientious, and perceptive work. Atlas grapples with what makes a good biographer (total empathy with one’s subject, among other traits), why biographies matter, and why he persists in writing them. He reveals his struggles dealing with subjects both famous (Saul Bellow, who agreed to interviews but remained wary and unenthusiastic about Atlas’s project) and obscure (Delmore Schwartz—“no one outside the literary world had ever heard of him”). Atlas also provides a rich literary history of biographers that includes the ancient Greeks and Romans, who decided to write “lives” rather than histories, the Renaissance writers who dealt with the dawning of “self-consciousness,” James Boswell’s masterful work on Dr. Samuel Johnson, and the flowering of the form in the Victorian era. Given top billing are the writers who inspired him: his Oxford professor Richard Ellmann, whose biography of James Joyce motivated Atlas to become a biographer; Michael Holroyd, whose work on Lytton Strachey made Atlas fall in love with “the scaffolding... that surrounds the main text”; and Dwight Macdonald, who edited his work in progress on Schwartz (“His challenges, objurgations, rebukes—and occasional praise—defaced every page”). Part literary history and part memoir, this is a lively and elegant biography of biography itself.
June 15, 2017
An illuminating account of a career as a biographer.A literary critic, magazine editor, memoirist, novelist, and founder of the Lippert/Viking Penguin Lives series of biographies, Atlas (My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale, 2005, etc.), who has penned acclaimed biographies of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, digs deep into his own psyche to explain why he became attracted to the craft of biography. He also delves into why he chose Schwartz and Bellow as his subjects--Schwartz after the poet's death and Bellow, an ambivalent subject, while still living. Beset with doubts about his ability to complete either biography satisfactorily and despite some moments of unwise hubris, Atlas could never divorce himself from the occupation of peering into the lives of others. He repeatedly impresses upon readers the sacred responsibility of rendering someone else's life so that it is not only factually correct, but also emotionally accurate. Along the way, Atlas offers insights into dealing with sources who innocently remember events that never occurred, who knowingly exaggerate or lie, or who want to cooperate but die before the frantic biographer can schedule interviews. Because the author specializes in biographies of writers--as opposed to, say, celebrities, politicians, athletes, or business tycoons--he must interpret their published pages. That can cause difficulties when the second reading of a novel yields a reaction divergent from the original reading. For example, Atlas realized years after becoming Bellow's biographer that most of the novels that seemed nearly perfect at first were actually less compelling upon close examination. The author is especially insightful about the pitfalls and occasional advantages of choosing a living person as the subject of the biography. His relationship with Bellow became so complicated at times that he found it difficult to sort out his own feelings. A brutally honest examination of the biographical craft and a good companion piece to Richard Holmes' This Long Pursuit(2017).
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Starred review from August 1, 2017
How did an unproven writer in his twenties become the biographer of poet and writer Delmore Schwartz? And how did he then muster the temerity and resilience to write a living biography of Saul Bellow, a complicated, 11-year commitment? In the vein of Meryle Secrest's Shoot the Widow (2007) and This Long Pursuit (2017) by Richard Holmes, Atlas relays all with wry hilarity, bighearted candor, and effervescent passion for the art of literary biography, from the toils and thrills of research to the lonely struggles of distillation, interpretation, and composition. He reflects on the inspiration and instruction he gleaned from biographers Boswell (on Johnson), Richard Ellmann (on Joyce), and Leon Edel (on James), while addressing thickety ethical questions and intriguing aesthetic concerns. Anecdotes of diligence and serendipity, told with wit and wisdom, explicate the need for a biographer to practice empathic observation and self-suppression. Atlas rhapsodizes over the transfer of emotional energy one experiences while handling letters, journals, and photographs, tangible life records that biographers of the future will likely have to do without, and records the intensity of the relationships his inquiries catalyzed, especially his endless negotiations with the prickly and wily Bellow. Atlas' expert, provocative, and enlightening biographer's tale is a work of both depth and radiance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)
March 15, 2017
Atlas is a publishing-world fixture, e.g., he founded "Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives" series and has been a staff writer, contributor, or editor for publications such as Time and The New Yorker. But he's likely best known to general readers as the author of the monumental Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, a National Book Award nominee. Here he looks at the biographer's art, from the Renaissance writers of various "Lives" to James Bowell and Richard Ellmann to his own work.
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.