Ellmann joyce biography
- Ellmann tracks his family history, early life in Ireland, and then growth to adulthood in this book.
- Richard David Ellmann was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats.
- James Joyce is a biography of the Irish modernist James Joyce written by Richard Ellmann, which informs an understanding of this author's complex works.
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James Joyce
Upon its publication in 1959, this book was recognized as the definitive study of Joyce's life. In honor of the James Joyce Centenary in 1982, the author published a new edition, thoroughly revised and expanded. Ellmann's original research led him from Dublin to Joyce's haunts in Europe. In the process he discovered many people who served as partial models for Joyce's characters, networks of association in which they were placed, and he shows how Joyce converted this raw material into brilliant works of fiction. Ellmann gives a fascinating account of the literary milieu in which Joyce worked, and discusses his relationship with Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, Hemingway, Proust, Pound, Larbaud, and Fitzgerald. His dramatic portrait of Joyce as son, lover, husband. father, and artist provides the key to understanding Joyce's revolutionary writings. This new edition, for a new generation, Ellmann feels "may help to assuage some of the curiosity that still persists about this bizarre and wonderful creature who turned literature and language on its end."--Publisher description.
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James Joyce
This review is almost shamefully long, but is written for my own record of quotes and findings. Ellmann’s James Joyce is the usually the first-thought-of book when talking literary biographies. It covers the Irish writer’s entire life across 800-odd pages, filled with photographs, letters, snippets from his works, letters from friends, and just about everything you could hope for in an all-encompassing portrait of the artist. Attempting to remotely capture the depth of Ellmann’s book would be fruitless; it feels as if every anecdote, every thought, every moment, of Joyce’s life is within these pages.
As a general rule, I don't like to spend more than a month on a single book, whatever it is. There have been some slips: Infinite Jest took me a month and several days, but otherwise I like to keep all my reading within a month of starting. This biography took me over 2 months to read, savouring everything, underlining things, writing in the margins, attempting to commit it all to memory. The book itself is a hardback-sized pap
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James Joyce (biography)
1959 biography of Irish writer James Joyce, by American academic Richard Ellmann
James Joyce is a biography of the Irish modernistJames Joyce written by Richard Ellmann, which informs an understanding of this author's complex works. It was published in 1959 (a revised edition was released in 1982).
Reception
Anthony Burgess was so impressed with the biographer's work that he claimed it to be "the greatest literary biography of the century."[1][2]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."[3] Ellmann quotes extensively from Finnegans Wake as epigraphs in his biography of Joyce.
References
- ^Lorraine, Janzen Kooistra (Winter 1993). "The Biography of the Century: Another Look at Richard Ellmann's James Joyce". Biography. 16 (1): 31–45. doi:10.1353/bio.2010.0340. JSTOR
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