The biographer's autobiography

James Atlas is the biographer of two American writers, the forgotten poet Delmore Schwartz and the famous Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow. I have never had the opportunity to read these two biographies but now I will try to buy and read them. What I have read is the wonderful autobiography of Atlas himself, where he explains how he became a biographer, and he tells us some of the secrets of his speciality, starting with what he learned at Oxford (a place he didn't particularly enjoy) in the beginnings of his career. I knew about the book after reading a positive review by a Spanish writer in a newspaper. The book, entitled "The Shadow in the Garden. A Biographer's Tale," is a love letter to books and book writers and critics in general. Atlas tells us about his emotions and physical sensations in those moments where he lived through experiences such as finding some special document or meeting some important character. He is also very open about his tension with Bellow and the many flaws of this author as a human being. The difference between Bellow and Schwartz from the point of view of Atlas is that he never met the latter (although he shared with him the problem of depression) but he interacted frequently with the former. The last chapters of the book discuss the future of biography. In the past, writing a biography was about collecting documents such as letters, personal journals and objects, unpublished manuscripts, and interviewing people who had interacted with the subject of the book. With the Internet, email, social networks, blogs and you tube, the lives of famous authors are very much in the public domain. Perhaps it will not be about writing a biography any more, but about putting together materials in a web site. But then many of the emotions associated with the old art of a biography will not be there any longer.The footnotes are not to be missed, full of irony and interesting insights to complement the general text. I really enjoyed reading this book.