James Atlas


James Robert Atlas was an American writer, biographer, editor, and publisher. He was the president of Atlas & Company and founding editor of the Penguin Lives Series.

Early life and education

Atlas was born in Evanston, Illinois, to Donald and Nora Atlas. His father was a physician and his mother was a homemaker. Atlas graduated in 1967 from high school in Evanston, during the turmoil of the 1960s.
He studied at Harvard under Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop with the intention of becoming a poet. He went to Oxford and studied under the biographer Richard Ellmann, as a Rhodes Scholar. During his time at Oxford he was inspired to become a biographer.

Career

Atlas was a contributor to The New Yorker, and he was an editor at The New York Times Magazine for many years. He edited volumes of poetry and wrote several novels and two biographies. In 2002, he started Atlas Books, which at one time published two series in conjunction with HarperCollins and W. W. Norton. In 2007, the company was renamed Atlas & Company, to coincide with the launch of its new list. Atlas joined Amazon Publishing and Atlas & Company stopped publishing new titles in 2012.
Atlas's work appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, New York magazine, and The Huffington Post.

Personal life and death

In 1975 he married psychiatrist Dr. Anna Fels. Atlas died in Manhattan, New York on September 4, 2019, from complications of a lung condition. He was survived by his wife and a son, daughter, and grandson.

Works

  • Ten American Poets: An Anthology of Poems, Cheadle: Carcanet Press, 1973
  • Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1977
  • The Great Pretender, New York: Atheneum, 1986.
  • Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America, New York: W.W. Norton, 1993
  • Bellow: A Biography, New York: Random House and London: Faber, 2000
  • My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale, New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
  • , regarding some global views of America.
  • The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale, New York: Pantheon Books, 2017