The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale, Hardcover

Descriere

The biographer's autobiography: a funny, endearing tale of how writers' lives get documented, by the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz. The biographer--so often in the shadows, kibbitzing, casting doubt, proving facts--here comes to the stage. James Atlas takes us back to his 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 the author's first subject, the ""self-doomed"" poet Delmore Schwartz; a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the ""tall trees,"" as Mary Mc Carthy described them, cut down now, Atlas writes, 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 ""Meshuggeneh"" 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)