Richard Ellmann

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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 greatest literary biographies of the 20th century.

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. Ellmann served Emory University as the school's first Robert W. Woodruff Professor from 1980-1987.

In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Ellmann drew on conversations with George Yeats along with thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts to write a critical examination of the poet's life. The Pulitzer Prize winning (1989) biography Oscar Wilde is considered essential reading for any scholar of Wilde's. Ellmann captures the warmhearted and generous spirit of the legendary wit, as he examines Wilde's ascent to literary prominence, and his public downfall.

Ellmann is perhaps best 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 Ellmann's 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.

His biography of Oscar Wilde was the basis for the 1997 movie Wilde, directed by Brian Gilbert.

He was Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford University, 1970-1984, then Professor Emeritus, and a fellow at New College, Oxford, 1970-1987.

Richard Ellmann died in Oxford, aged 69. His wife, Mary (c. 1921 - 1989), whom he married in 1949, was also a literary critic. The couple had three children: Stephen Ellmann, Lucy Ellmann, (b. 1956) and Maud Ellmann (b. 1954) are respectively a novelist and an academic.