Richard Ellmann

American · 1918 to 1987

Born March 15, 1918, in Highland Park, Michigan, the second of three sons of a Romanian Jewish lawyer and a Ukrainian Jewish mother from Kyiv, Ellmann grew up in Detroit before going up to Yale, where he took his B.A. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1947, sitting on the Yale Literary Magazine's editorial board alongside a classmate named James Jesus Angleton, later the CIA's counterintelligence chief. He served in the U.S. Navy and the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, then crossed to Trinity College Dublin for a further degree while researching his first book, a life of W. B. Yeats built partly on conversations with the poet's widow, George. He taught at Northwestern and later at Yale before Oxford made him Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in 1970, a chair he held for fourteen years while also holding a fellowship at New College. In 1949 he married the essayist Mary Donoghue; they had three children, including the novelist Lucy Ellmann. His life of James Joyce, published in 1959 after years spent tracking down the writer's surviving friends, family, and lovers across Dublin, Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, won the National Book Award and is still widely called the finest literary biography of the twentieth century; he revised it substantially in 1982. In 1980 he moved to Emory University as Robert W. Woodruff Professor while continuing to teach at Oxford. Diagnosed with motor neurone disease in his final years, he raced to finish a life of Oscar Wilde, completing it without time to revise it fully. He died in Oxford on May 13, 1987, at sixty-nine; Oscar Wilde won the National Book Critics Circle Award the following year and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1989.