Richard Ellmann (March 15 1918 – May 13 1987) was a prominent American/British literary
critic and biographer of Irish writers such
as James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. Ellmann's James Joyce
(1959), for which he won the National Book Award in 1960, is considered one of the better literary biographies of the 20th
century and the 1982 revised edition of the work was similarly recognised with the award of
the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
He was born at Highland Park, Michigan, the second of the three sons (there
were no daughters) of James Isaac Ellmann, lawyer, a Jewish Romanian immigrant, and his wife, Jeanette Barsook, an immigrant from Kiev. He
studied at Yale University, where he later taught, and where with Charles Feidelson,
Jr., he edited the extraordinarily important anthology, The Modern Tradition. He earlier taught at Northwestern, and later
at Oxford, before serving (for a considerable stipend) as Emory University's Robert W.
Woodruff Professor from 1980 till his death.
In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Ellmann drew on conversations with George Yeats along with thousands of pages of
unpublished manuscripts to write a critical examination of the poet's life. His Pulitzer
Prize winning (1989) biography Oscar Wilde is standard. Capturing the warmhearted and
generous spirit of the legendary wit, he examines Wilde's ascent to literary prominence and his public downfall. The book was the
basis for the 1997 movie Wilde, directed by Brian Gilbert.
Ellmann is perhaps most well known for his masterful literary biography of James Joyce, a remarkably revealing account of the
life of one of the 20th century's most influential literary figures. Anthony Burgess
called James Joyce "the greatest literary biography of the century."
Ellmann uses his consummate knowledge of the Irish milieu to bring together four literary
luminaries in Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, a
collection of essays first delivered at the Library of Congress.
He was Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford University,
1970-1984, then Professor Emeritus, and a fellow at New
College, Oxford, 1970-1987. Burgess said that Ellmann "wrote nothing that wasn’t witty, inelegant or lacking in profound
humanity”.
Ellmann died in Oxford, aged 69. His wife, Mary (c. 1921 - 1989), whom he married in 1949, was
an essayist. The couple had three children: Stephen, Lucy (b. 1956) and Maud (b. 1954), the last two being a novelist and an
academic, respectively.
Many of his collected papers, artifacts, and ephemera were acquired by the University of
Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives. Other manuscripts are housed in the
Northwestern University's Library special collections department.
Major works
- Yeats: The Man And The Masks (1948; revised edition in 1979)
- James Joyce (1959; revised edition in 1982)
- Oscar Wilde (1987)
- Ulysses on the Liffey
References
External Links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
