James Atlas (born 1949), is the president of Atlas & Company, publishers, and founding editor of the Penguin Lives Series.[1] 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.[2] 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 The New York Times Book Review,[3] The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Harper's,[4] New York Magazine,[5] and Huffington Post.[6]
He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award. He spent nearly a decade researching and writing his biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author, Saul Bellow.[7] He is also the author of My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale, an adaptation of a series of articles he did for The New Yorker, and The Great Pretender, a semi-autobiographical novel about coming of age in the 1960s. He is a longtime board member of the Harvard Advocate, which has previously published his work.