James Atlas
James Robert Atlas was a writer, especially of biographies, as well as a publisher. He was the president of Atlas & Company, and founding editor of the Penguin Lives Series.
He was born in 1949 outside Chicago, and attended Harvard University, studying under Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop with the intention to become a poet. He later attended Oxford University and studied under Richard Ellmann as a prestigious Rhodes Scholar. Here, he decided that he wanted to become a biographer.
“All of us, I suspect, imagine that a world exists from which we alone have been excluded; all of us have our noses pressed against the glass. But if we contemplate our own lives, not the phantom life on the other side, we might find things in them to envy-a family that’s intact; a job we like; excellent health (the thing we take for granted and on which all happiness depends). Good fortune is there, however sporadic, however modest, however difficult to achieve. The trick is to recognize it.”
James Atlas