James Atlas

"Saul Bellow's parents fled Russia in 1913 and settled with relatives in Canada, where Saul was born. Bellow's boyhood in Quebec and Chicago, marked by his family's transient existence and struggle for economic survival (his father was a bootlegger for a time), provided inspiration for many of the memorable characters and scenes that animate his fiction. It was in Chicago that Bellow came into his own, discovering his unique voice and encountering many of the women, as well as the writers and intellectuals, who were to populate his novels and his life. Atlas draws upon Bellow's vast correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries in this rich and revealing account of one writer's experience of America's twentieth-century intellectual and literary history."--BOOK JACKET.

"Does it matter which books college students read? Indeed it does, contends James Atlas. What we read has crucial implications for both our development as individuals and our ability to establish consensus on national issues. We are what we read." "Where once the giants of Western thought - Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante - had pride of place, university courses now boast authors such as Raymond Chandler, Alice Walker, and Louis L'Amour. Traditionalists argue that abandoning the "Great Books" spells doom for America's education system, a system that multiculturalists have called a white, elitist scam that fails to reflect America's multi-ethnic, non-European heritage." "Has the "opening" of the curriculum gone too far? Atlas's attempt to answer this question takes him to university classrooms across America, where the canon of "Great Books" is being dismantled in the name of political correctness, and into his own past, as he considers the influence of these books on his own life." "As ethnic groups reassert their identities and break from traditional assimilation, Atlas argues, America's need for common ground is greater than ever. Unless there is a set of core beliefs upon which to build consensus, there may soon be no clear idea of America, no common heritage, and no unified future." "Like The Closing of the American Mind and The Disuniting of America, Battle of the Books is a powerful, unsettling argument that calls attention to a looming crisis in American education."--Jacket.

In this collection of essays, novelists and other writers from around the world share their perceptions of the United States.

E.T.H.S. graduate (class of 1967), James Atlas describes, in thinly veiled fiction, growing up in Evanston and attending ETHS in the 1960's. Although he later attends Harvard and wins a fellowship to Oxford, his roots remain on the North Shore.

Presents the story of a man's midlife years as he discusses the challenges of raising children, caring for aging parents, maintaining financial stability, and taking care of his own health.

"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.""--