Ellmann's Joyce
The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year
The story of the most acclaimed literary biography of the twentieth century—an ingeniously plotted, behind-the-scenes account of how the literary critic and scholar Richard Ellmann shaped James Joyce’s reputation.
Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, published in 1959, was hailed by Anthony Burgess as “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” Frank Kermode thought the book would “fix Joyce’s image for a generation,” a prediction that was if anything too cautious. The biography won the National Book Award and durably secured Joyce’s standing as a preeminent modernist.
Ellmann’s Joyce provides the biography of the biography, exploring how Ellmann came to his subject, gained the cooperation of Joyce’s family and estate, shrewdly, doggedly collected vital papers and interviews, placated publishers, thwarted competitors, and carefully balanced narrative with literary analysis. Ellmann’s Joyce also removes the veil from the biographer—richly rewarded in public, admirable in private life, but also possessed of a startling secret life. An eminent biographer himself, Zachary Leader constructs a powerful argument not only in support of Ellmann’s intellectual and artistic claims but also on behalf of literary biography generally. In the process, he takes readers on a rare tour through midcentury publishing houses in New York and London, as well as the corridors and classrooms of elite universities, from Yale to Oxford. The influence of Ellmann’s book, recognized instantly, persists to this day, among literary scholars and Joyce fans alike.
Filled with surprising details, tales of intrigue from the heyday of literary publishing, and intimate portraits of the Joyce and Ellmann families, Ellmann’s Joyce is as immersive as a walk around town with Leopold Bloom and as moving as the thickly drifted snow on Michael Furey’s grave.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Leader (The Life of Saul Bellow), an English professor emeritus at the University of Roehampton in London, provides an excellent account of the making of literary scholar Richard Ellmann's 1959 biography of James Joyce. Providing detailed biographical background on Ellmann, Leader describes how his time with the Office of Strategic Services during WWII honed his ability to identify patterns in disparate pieces of intelligence, preparing him to make sense of Joyce's scattered papers. According to Leader, Ellmann became interested in writing about Joyce after learning from W.B. Yeats's widow, whom Ellmann visited while researching his dissertation on the poet, that a 20-year-old Joyce had once told the elder Yeats "you are too old for me to help you," displaying an arrogance that Ellmann enviously contrasted with his own "mild" manner. The comprehensive recreation of how Ellmann wrote James Joyce covers his successful efforts to head off other scholars by negotiating exclusive access to important documents and his skillful navigation of tensions between rival keepers of Joyce's legacy (Ellmann hid from Joyce's son, Giorgio, that he had access to publisher Maria Solas's letters from Joyce, fearing that Giorgio would claim them and "lock them away"). The scrupulous research painstakingly brings to life the contentious gestation of the still-definitive work on Joyce. A riveting glimpse inside the biography writing process, this scintillates. Photos.
