Showing results by author "James Atlas" in All Categories

Three great historians write compelling, relevent biographies of three of our most important and famous presidents in this collection of Eminent Lives Michael Korda brings his acclaimed storytelling talents to the life of Ulysses S. Grant—a man who managed to end the Civil War on a note of...

To most audiences, Philip Roth is a literary icon, author of probing, provocative works like American Pastoral, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Goodbye, Columbus. But to James Atlas, Philip Roth was more than just a writer—he was a friend. In 1977, when he was 28, James Atlas published his first book, a biography of the poet Delmore Schwartz, and was stunned to receive a congratulatory letter from Philip Roth. He had been moved by the tragic story it told.

Symphony Space invited three renowned biographers, James Atlas, Edmund Morris and Stacy Schiff, to reveal the fascinating, all-absorbing process of researching and writing another person's life story. The conversation delved deeply into the challenges the authors encountered and the pleasures they enjoyed in writing the lives of Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, Vera Nabakov and Saul Bellow, as well as the difficulty of getting past the "unreliable narrator."