American · 1918–1987
Richard Ellmann wrote what is widely called the finest literary biography of the twentieth century, and then, dying, wrote another one. James Joyce (1959) reconstructed a life almost nobody thought could be reconstructed — the Dublin years, the poverty in Trieste and Zurich, the eyes, the drinking, Nora, the seventeen years of Finnegans Wake — from letters, interviews with survivors, and a command of the fiction that let him show how experience became text. It won the National Book Award, was substantially revised in 1982, and opens with a sentence scholars still quote: we are still learning to be James Joyce's contemporaries. Oscar Wilde (1987) appeared weeks after Ellmann's death from motor neurone disease and won the Pulitzer Prize. Ulysses on the Liffey (1972) is his close reading of the novel's structure, schema and comedy. An American who spent much of his career in Britain, he taught at Northwestern, Yale and Oxford, where he held the Goldsmiths' chair. He also edited Joyce's letters and, with Charles Feidelson, the standard anthology of modernist source texts.