Richard Ellmann
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Richard Ellmann (March 15, 1918 – May 13, 1987) was a prominent American literary critic and biographer of Irish writers such as James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. Ellmann's James Joyce (1959), for which he won the National Book Award in 1960, is considered one of the greatest literary biographies of the 20th century.
He was born at Highland Park, Michigan, and studied at Yale University. He died at Oxford.
In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Ellmann drew on conversations with the poet's widow and thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts to write a critical examination of the poet's life. The Pulitzer Prize winning (1989) biography Oscar Wilde is considered essential reading for any scholar of Wilde's work and served as the basis for the film Wilde. Ellmann captures the warmhearted and generous spirit of the legendary wit, as he examines Wilde's ascent to literary prominence, and his public downfall.
Ellmann is perhaps best known for his masterpiece of literary biography James Joyce, a remarkably revealing account of the life of one of the 20th-century's most influential literary figures. Anthony Burgess called Ellmann's James Joyce, "The greatest literary biography of the century." Ellmann uses his consummate knowledge of the Irish milieu to bring together four literary luminaries in Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the collection of essays first delivered at the Library of Congress.
Major works
- Yeats: The Man And The Masks (1948; revised edition in 1979)
- James Joyce (1959; revised edition in 1982)
- Oscar Wilde (1988)
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