James Atlas Ordre des livres (chronologique)

Delmore Schwartz was only twenty-four in 1938 when his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was published. and received praise from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. For Tate, it was “the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Eliot and Pound.” A decade later, the short-story collection The World Is a Wedding was published; many critics characterized it as the definitive portrait of their generation. In this biography, the first about the man whom John Berryman called “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century,” James Atlas traces Schwartz’s history, from the arrival of his Romanian ancestors in New York, to his youth in Washington Heights, to his career at Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, and onward to the flowering of his generation in the '40s, when he and the critics, poets, and novelists who were his friends made their reputations. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet is based on interviews, letters, and an extraordinary collection of unpublished papers that had never before been examined. Schwartz’s brilliant satires of his friends and acquaintances, his autobiographical stories, and his letters to his illustrious peers contribute to this vivid portrait of an era—and of that era’s most trenchant chronicler.

" Franchement, j'en ai assez des ennuis des autres... J'ai vraiment trop de mal à être à la hauteur de ce que certains exigent de moi. " Ainsi s'exprime Gabe Wallach, un charmant jeune homme, fils d'un riche dentiste new-yorkais, qui, au moyen d'efforts souvent maladroits, cherche à concilier sa vie facile et les sacrifices qu'il devrait faire pour aider son prochain. Autour de lui, des alliés volontaires ou forcés participent à cette lutte frénétique : Martha Reganhart, une divorcée au grand coeur et à l'esprit très pratique ; Paul Jerz, un jeune et mélancolique collègue de Gabe à l'Université de Chicago ; Libby Herz, sa jeune épouse envoûtante et capricieuse. Attiré par chacun des trois personnages, Gabe passe par des péripéties comiques et tragiques pour venir au secours des autres sans trop donner de sa personne. A la fin seulement il apprend à " laisser courir " et à accepter la confusion de la vie.

With this masterly and original work, A Biography , National Book Award nominee James Atlas gives the first definitive account of the Nobel Prize–winning author’s turbulent personal and professional life, as it unfolded against the background of twentieth-century events—the Depression, World War II, the upheavals of the sixties—and amid all the complexities of the Jewish-immigrant experience in America, which generated a vibrant new literature.Drawing upon a vast body of original research, including Bellow’s extensive correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries of the twentieth-century literary community, Atlas weaves a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most talented and enigmatic figures in American intellectual history.Detailing Bellow’s volatile marriages and numerous tempestuous relation-ships with women, publishers, and friends, A Biography is a magnificent chronicle of one of the premier writers in the English language, whose prize-winning works include Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and, most recently, Ravelstein .

"Saul Bellow's parents fled Russia in 1913 and settled with relatives in Canada, where Saul was born. Bellow's boyhood in Quebec and Chicago, marked by his family's transient existence and struggle for economic survival (his father was a bootlegger for a time), provided inspiration for many of the memorable characters and scenes that animate his fiction. It was in Chicago that Bellow came into his own, discovering his unique voice and encountering many of the women, as well as the writers and intellectuals, who were to populate his novels and his life. Atlas draws upon Bellow's vast correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries in this rich and revealing account of one writer's experience of America's twentieth-century intellectual and literary history."--Jacket

As he makes his way through the 1960s from his suburban Chicago high school to Harvard and on to graduate studies at Oxford, Ben Janis continues to lust after girls and the literary life. (Nancy Pearl)