Richard Ellmann
Richard David Ellmann (March 15, 1918 – May 13, 1987) was a prominent American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959),[1] which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century; its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A liberal humanist, Ellmann's academic work generally focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.
Life
Ellmann was born at Highland Park, Michigan, the second of three children (all sons) of James Isaac Ellmann, lawyer, a Jewish Romanian immigrant, and his wife, Jeanette Barsook, an immigrant from Kiev. He served in the United States Navy during World War II. He studied at Yale University, receiving his B.A. (1939), his M.A. (1941) and his PhD. (1947) for which he won the John Addison Porter Prize.[2] In 1947 he was awarded a B.Litt degree (an earlier form of the M.Litt) from the University of Dublin (Trinity College), where he was resident while researching his biography of Yeats.[3]
He would later return to teach at Yale, and there with Charles Feidelson, Jr., he edited the extraordinarily important anthology, The Modern Tradition. He earlier taught at Northwestern, and at the University of Oxford, before serving as Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Professor from 1980 until his death.
He was Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford University, 1970–1984, then Professor Emeritus, and a fellow at New College, Oxford, 1970-1987.
Ellmann used his knowledge of the Irish milieu to bring together four literary luminaries in Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (1987), a collection of essays first delivered at the Library of Congress.
His wife, Mary (c. 1921 - 1989), whom he married in 1949, was an essayist. The couple had three children: Stephen (b. 1951), Maud (b. 1954), and Lucy (b. 1956), the first two being academics and the third a novelist and teacher of writing.
Ellmann died of motor neurone disease in Oxford, aged 69.
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.
Biographies
Yeats
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.
Joyce
Ellmann is perhaps most well known for his literary biography of James Joyce, a 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." Edna O'Brien, the Irish novelist, remarked that "H. G. Wells said that Finnegans Wake was an immense riddle, and people find it too difficult to read. I have yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of it—except perhaps my friend Richard Ellmann." [4] Ellmann quotes extensively from Finnegans Wake, as epigraphs in James Joyce.
Wilde
Ellman's biography Oscar Wilde won a Pulitzer Prize and is still the standard life.[5] Capturing the warmhearted and generous spirit of the legendary wit, he examined Wilde's ascent to literary prominence and his public downfall. Posthumously he won both a U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988[6] and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.[7] The book was the basis for the 1997 film Wilde, directed by Brian Gilbert.
It is considered to be the definitive work on the subject.[8] Ray Monk, a philosopher and biographer, described Ellmann's Oscar Wilde as a "rich, fascinating biography that succeeds in understanding another person".[9]
Bibliography
This literature-related list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.As author
- Yeats: The Man And The Masks (1948; revised edition in 1979)
- The Identity of Yeats (1954; second edition in 1964)
- James Joyce (1959; revised edition in 1982)
- Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (1970)
- Literary Biography: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 4 May 1971 (1971)
- Ulysses on the Liffey (1972)
- Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (1976)
- The Consciousness of Joyce (1977)
- James Joyce's hundredth birthday, side and front views: A lecture delivered at the Library of Congress on March 10, 1982 (1982)
- Oscar Wilde at Oxford (1984)
- W.B. Yeats’s Second Puberty; A Lecture Delivered At The Library Of Congress On April 2, 1984 (1985)
- Oscar Wilde (1987) [but see Horst Schroeder: Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann's OSCAR WILDE, second edition, revised and enlarged (2002)]
- Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (1987)
As editor
- My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years (Stanislaus Joyce; ed. Richard Ellmann, 1958)
- The Critical Writings of James Joyce (Eds. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, 1959)
- Letters of James Joyce Vol. 2 (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1966)
- Letters of James Joyce Vol. 3 (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1966)
- Giacomo Joyce (James Joyce; ed. Richard Ellmann, 1968)
- Oscar Wilde: a Collection of Critical Essays (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1969)
- The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde" (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1969)
- The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (Eds. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, 1973)
- Selected Letters of James Joyce (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1975)
- Modern Poems: An Introduction to Poetry (Eds. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, 1976)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings by Oscar Wilde (Ed. Ellmann, 1982)
References
- ↑ "National Book Awards – 1960". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 19 March 2012.
(With acceptance speech by Ellman.) - ↑ Historical Register of Yale University, 1937-1951 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 80.
- ↑ 1970 TCD Association Register.
- ↑ Interview, The Art of Fiction No. 82, The Paris Review, Issue 92, Summer 1984.
- ↑ "The 10 most popular misconceptions about Oscar Wilde". The Guardian (London). 22 July 2008.
- ↑ "All Past National Book Critics Circle Award Winners and Finalists". National Book Critics Circle. Retrieved 22 February 2010.
- ↑ "Autobiography or Biography". Past winners & finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 22 February 2010.
- ↑ Holland, Merlin (7 May 2003). "The 10 most popular misconceptions about Oscar Wilde". London: Guardian. Retrieved 22 February 2010.
- ↑ "Ray Monk on Philosophy and Biography" (audio). philosophy bites. 31 August 2008. Retrieved 22 February 2010.
Sources
External links
- University of Tulsa McFarlin Library's inventory of the Richard Ellmann collection housed in their special collections department.
- Richard Ellmann Papers, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois
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