James Atlas

James Robert Atlas (March 22, 1949 – September 4, 2019) 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.

Atlas was born in Evanston, Illinois to Donald and Nora (Glassenberg) Atlas.

His father was a physician and his mother was a homemaker.

Atlas graduated in 1967 from high school in Evanston, during the turmoil of the 1960s.

He studied at Harvard under Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop with the intention of becoming a poet.

He went to Oxford and studied under the biographer Richard Ellmann, as a Rhodes Scholar.

During his time at Oxford he was inspired to become a biographer.

Atlas was a contributor to The New Yorker, and he was an editor at The New York Times Magazine for many years.

He edited volumes of poetry and wrote several novels and two biographies.

In 1975 he married psychiatrist Dr. Anna Fels.

In 2002, he started Atlas Books, which at one time published two series in conjunction with HarperCollins and W.W. Norton.

In 2007, the company was renamed Atlas & Company, to coincide with the launch of its new list.

Atlas joined Amazon Publishing and Atlas & Company stopped publishing new titles in 2012.

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

Atlas died in Manhattan, New York on September 4, 2019, from complications of a lung condition.

He was survived by his wife and a son, daughter, and grandson.