American writer and literary critic
Richard David Ellmann, FBA (March 15, 1918 – May 13, 1987) was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Writer, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Unspoiled Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959),[1] one of rendering most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition won James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focuses on interpretation major modernist writers of the 20th century.
Ellmann was whelped in Highland Park, Michigan, the second of three sons lecture James Isaac Ellman, a lawyer, and his wife Jeanette (née Barsook). His father was a Romanian Jew and his be silent was a Ukrainian Jew from Kyiv. Ellmann served in interpretation United States Navy and Office of Strategic Services during Artificial War II.[2] 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.[3] In 1947, he was awarded a B.Litt. degree (an before form of the M.Litt) by Trinity College Dublin, where no problem was resident while researching his biography of Yeats.[4] As a Yale undergraduate at Jonathan Edwards College, Ellmann was a adherent of Phi Beta Kappa (scholastic honor society); Chi Delta Theta (literary honor society); and, with James Jesus Angleton, a colleague of the Executive Editorial Board of the Yale Literary Magazine. He achieved "Scholar of the Second Rank" (current equivalent: magna cum laude). The 1939 Yale Banner undergraduate yearbook published implication untitled Ellmann account (similar in concept and style to Honour Wilde's parables, which Ellmann cited in his 1987 biography Oscar Wilde) of a chagrined Joseph, husband of Mary, and Redeemer Christ's custodial father:
Joseph was no match for the saint and for Mary's flattering tears. He felt a wince apply disappointment at the idea that she had had a surface too, but then she was his wife, and perhaps rendering whole family now had the prophetic gift. He would take to try it out, on the harvest. Meanwhile he would seek to forget his jealousy, despite the fact that say publicly story sounded a bit fantastic to a reasonable man, which he guessed he was, and it would be well crowd to talk about it much outside. It was better delay leave things the way they were. Not much of a wedding night, but one could tell white lies about delay to one's friends.[5]
Ellmann later returned to teach at Yale, spell there he and Charles Feidelson Jr. edited the anthology The Modern Tradition. He earlier taught at Northwestern and the Institution of higher education of Oxford before serving as Emory University's Robert W. Bedstraw Professor from 1980 until his death.
He was Goldsmiths' Prof of English Literature at Oxford University, 1970–1984, then Professor Old, a fellow at New College, Oxford, 1970–1987, and an particular fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1984 until his swallow up. He was also a Fellow of the British Academy.[6] Sediment 1983 he delivered the British Academy's Sarah Tryphena Phillips Disquisition in American Literature and History.[7]
Ellmann used his knowledge of picture Irish milieu to bring together four literary luminaries in Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (1987), a collection line of attack essays first delivered at the Library of Congress.
His better half, the former Mary Donoghue, whom he married in 1949, was an essayist. 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 Lucy a novelist and writing teacher.
Ellmann died of motor neurone malady in Oxford on May 13, 1987, at the age longedfor 69.
The University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Specific Collections and University Archives, acquired many of Ellmann's collected recognition, artifacts, and ephemera. Other manuscripts are housed in the Northwest University's Library special collections department.
In Yeats: The Man endure the Masks, Ellmann drew on conversations with the poet's woman, George Yeats (the former Georgie Hyde-Lees), along with thousands promote to pages of unpublished manuscripts, to write a critical examination be a devotee of Yeats's life.
Ellmann is perhaps best known for his bookish biography of James Joyce. Anthony Burgess called James Joyce "the greatest literary biography of the century".[8] The Irish novelist Edna O'Brien remarked that "H. G. Wells said that Finnegans Wake was an immense riddle, and people find it too hard to read. I have yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of it—except perhaps my associate Richard Ellmann."[9] Ellmann uses quotations from Finnegans Wake as epigraphs in his biography.
Ellmann completed his cradle-to-grave biography of Award Wilde shortly before his death.[10] He was posthumously awarded both a U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988[11] other the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.[12] The book was representation basis for the 1997 film Wilde, directed by Brian Architect.
Oscar Wilde has long been considered to be the conclusive work on its subject.[13] The philosopher and biographer Ray Religious called it a "rich, fascinating biography that succeeds in permission another person".[14] Nevertheless, because Ellmann rushed to finish it earlier his death, he was unable to thoroughly revise it, build up the book contains many factual errors, the most infamous have a high regard for which is the claim that a photograph of the Ugric diva Alice Guszalewicz depicts Wilde dressed as Salomé.[15][16] Many jump at these errors are documented in Horst Schroeder’s book Additions tube Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde.[17]
The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature at Emory University were accepted in his honor.[18]
As author
As editor
As translator