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"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 McCarthy 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 work of the classical biographers: the Renaissance writers of what were then called "lives," Samuel Johnson and the "meshugenah" Boswell, among them. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the luminaries of contemporary literature and the labor of those who hope to catch a glimpse of one of them--"as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd.""--
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1
Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale
2018, Little, Brown Book Group Limited
in English
1472153197 9781472153197
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2
Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale
2018, Little, Brown Book Group Limited
in English
1472153138 9781472153135
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3
Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale
2018, Little, Brown Book Group Limited
in English
147215312X 9781472153128
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4
Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale
2018, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
in English
0525431829 9780525431824
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5
The shadow in the garden: a biographer's tale
2017, Pantheon
in English
- First edition.
1101871695 9781101871690
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Feedback?December 19, 2022 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
May 23, 2019 | Created by MARC Bot | import new book |