"James Atlas", Evanston, Illinois the president of Atlas & Company, publishers, and founding editor of the Penguin Lives Series.

A Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and onetime contributor to The New Yorker, he was an editor at The New York Times Magazine for many years.

He has edited volumes of poetry and has written several novels and two biographies. In 2002, he started Atlas Books, which at one time published two series in conjunction with larger publishers. In 2007, the company was renamed Atlas & Company, to coincide with the launch of its first independent list in the spring of 2008. For an overview of the company and its '09 list, see: www.atlasandco.com.

Atlas' work appeared in New York Times/The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair (magazine)/Vanity Fair, Harper's, New York Magazine, and Huffington Post.

More James Atlas on Wikipedia.

Biographers, we're weird. For whatever reasons of conditioning, our temporal sense is different from other people's, and I knew it would take 10 years. And that's just the way it is.

205

I had no reports which described him as a stud.

188

I doubt the garrulous archive bequeathed us by the tape recorder will prove as memorable as Henry James's thank-you notes.

179

An account of some of these acts makes Henry Miller's crudest imaginations seem as chaste as a nun's diary.

175

If I had to put my money on it, ... I'd say he's not going to read it. He might leaf through it. He's not going to sit down and read it.

166

He describes himself as a mild depressive, and he goes through just terrible suffering, much of it self-generated. And yet he's also an extremely buoyant person who finds a great deal in life to entertain and instruct and amuse him. He has a kind of vivacity about him. He's very funny, and he's very obsessed with certain themes.

145

She's a very conservative person and has exceedingly good judgment. Usually, she's telling me, 'Don't do this! Mistake.' And this time, she said, 'I really think you should write this book, whether he wants you to or not.' To me, this was amazing. And she was right.

140

A penumbra of somber dignity has descended over his reputation.

135

He's someone who experiences a certain amount of bafflement about his talents. How did it happen? How did he become who he is?

101