The Shadow in the Garden

A Biographer's Tale

By: James Atlas

Narrated by: George Newbern

Length: 13 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

The biographer - so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts - comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers' lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own 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 Atlas's first subject, the "self-doomed" poet Delmore Schwartz. And we are introduced to a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the "tall pines", as Mary McCarthy once called them, cut down now, according to Atlas, 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 obsessive 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".

©2017 James Atlas (P)2017 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“A listener's treat.... Expertly read by George Newbern.... One of those rare literary gems that exceed their dimensions.” (David A. Walton, Audiofile)

“Witty, conscientious, and perceptive.... Part literary history and part memoir, this is a lively and elegant biography of biography itself.” (Publishers Weekly)

“The Shadow in the Garden is written on behalf of all the biographers whose honesty about their subjects was interpreted as gossip, or whose readability was maligned as salaciousness. Such are the pitfalls of the genre. But is biography writing worth it? Atlas thinks it is.” (Robert Minto, The New Republic)

“A work of both depth and radiance.... Expert, provocative, and enlightening...Atlas relays all with wry hilarity, bighearted candor, and effervescent passion for the art of literary biography.” (Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review)