Richard Ellmann

Richard David Ellmann, FBA (March 15, 1918 – May 13, 1987) was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats.

His wife, the former Mary Donoghue (1921–1989), whom he married in 1949, was an essayist.

He studied at Yale University, receiving his B.A. in 1939, his M.A. in 1941, and his PhD (for which he won the John Addison Porter Prize) in 1947.

The 1939 Yale Banner undergraduate yearbook published an untitled Ellmann account (similar in concept and style to Oscar Wilde's parables which Ellmann later cited in his 1987 biography Oscar Wilde) of a chagrined Joseph, husband of Mary, and Jesus Christ's custodial father:

"Joseph was no match for the angel and for Mary's flattering tears. He felt a wince of disappointment at the idea that she had had a vision too, but then she was his wife, and perhaps the whole family now had the prophetic gift. He would have to try it out, on the harvest. Meanwhile he would seek to forget his jealousy, despite the fact that the story sounded a bit fantastic to a reasonable man, which he guessed he was, and it would be well not to talk about it much outside. It was better to leave things the way they were. Not much of a wedding night, but one could tell white lies about that to one's friends."

Ellmann later returned to teach at Yale, and there with Charles Feidelson Jr., he edited the important anthology, The Modern Tradition.

In 1947, he was awarded a B.Litt.

degree (an earlier form of the M.Litt) from Trinity College Dublin, where he was resident while researching his biography of Yeats.

As a Yale undergraduate at Jonathan Edwards College, Ellmann was a member of Phi Beta Kappa (scholastic honor society); Chi Delta Theta (literary honor society); and, with James Jesus Angleton, a member of the Executive Editorial Board of the Yale Literary Magazine.

He achieved "Scholar of the Second Rank" (current equivalent: magna cum laude).

The couple had three children: Stephen (b. 1951), a South Africa constitutional scholar, Maud (b. 1954), and Lucy (b. 1956), the first two became academics and the third a novelist and teacher of writing.

He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century.

He was Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, 1970–1984, then Professor Emeritus, a fellow at New College, Oxford, Oxford, 1970–1987, and an extraordinary fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1984 until his death.

Additionally, he was a Fellow of the British Academy.

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.

Its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.

Ellmann was born in Highland Park, Michigan, the second of three sons of James Isaac Ellman, a lawyer, and his wife Jeanette (née Barsook).

His father was a Romanian Jew and his mother was a Ukrainian Jew from Kyiv.

Ellmann served in the United States Navy and Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

In 1983 he delivered the British Academy's Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American Literature and History.

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.

Ellmann died of motor neurone disease in Oxford on May 13, 1987, at the age of 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.

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.

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."

Ellmann quotes extensively from Finnegans Wake as epigraphs in his biography of Joyce.

Ellmann completed his cradle-to-grave biography of Oscar Wilde shortly before his death.

He was posthumously awarded both a U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

The book was the basis for the 1997 film Wilde, directed by Brian Gilbert.

Oscar Wilde has long been considered to be the definitive work on its subject.

Ray Monk, a philosopher and biographer, has described it as a "rich, fascinating biography that succeeds in understanding another person".

Nevertheless, because Ellmann rushed to finish it before his death he was unable to thoroughly revise it and the book contains many factual errors, the most infamous of which is the claim that a photograph of the Hungarian diva Alice Guszalewicz depicts Wilde dressed as Salomé.

A great number of these errors are documented in Horst Schroeder’s book Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde.

The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature at Emory University were established in his honor.

As author

As editor