Richard Ellmann


Richard David Ellmann, FBA, was an 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, one of the 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 the major modernist writers of the 20th century.

Life

Ellmann was born in Highland Park, Michigan, the second of three sons of James Isaac Ellman, a lawyer, and his wife Jeanette. 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. He studied at Yale University, receiving his B.A. in 1939, his M.A. in 1941, and his PhD in 1947. In 1947, he was awarded a B.Litt. degree by 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 ; Chi Delta Theta ; and, with James Jesus Angleton, a member of the Executive Editorial Board of the Yale Literary Magazine. He achieved "Scholar of the Second Rank". The 1939 Yale Banner undergraduate yearbook published an untitled Ellmann account of a chagrined Joseph, husband of Mary, and Jesus Christ's custodial father:
Ellmann later returned to teach at Yale, and there he and Charles Feidelson Jr. edited the anthology The Modern Tradition. He earlier taught at Northwestern and 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, a fellow at New College, Oxford, 1970–1987, and an extraordinary fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1984 until his death. He was also a Fellow of the British Academy. 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, a collection of essays first delivered at the Library of Congress.
His wife, the former Mary Donoghue, whom he married in 1949, was an essayist. The couple had three children: Stephen, a South Africa constitutional scholar, Maud, and Lucy. The first two became academics and Lucy a novelist and writing teacher.
Ellmann died of motor neurone disease in Oxford on May 13, 1987, at the age of 69.
The University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, acquired many of Ellmann's collected papers, artifacts, and ephemera. 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 the poet's widow, George Yeats, along with thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts, to write a critical examination of Yeats's life.

Joyce

Ellmann is perhaps best known for his literary biography of James Joyce. Anthony Burgess called James Joyce "the greatest literary biography of the century". The Irish novelist Edna O'Brien 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 uses quotations from Finnegans Wake as epigraphs in his biography.

Wilde

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. The philosopher and biographer Ray Monk called it 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. Many of these errors are documented in Horst Schroeder’s book Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde.

The Richard Ellmann Lectures

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

Richard Ellmann Lecturers