James Atlas (born 1949), is the president of Atlas & Company, publishers, and founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. A Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and longtime 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 biographies. In 2002, he started Atlas Books, which publishes several series in conjunction with larger publishers. Among its ongoing projects are the "Eminent Lives" series of short biographies (with HarperCollins) and the "Great Discoveries" series on science (with W. W. Norton and Co.). In 2007, the company was renamed Atlas & Company, to coincide with the launch of its first independent list in the spring of 2008.

His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and many other journals. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award. More recently, he spent nearly a decade researching and writing his biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author, Saul Bellow, entitled Bellow. 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.