Richard Ellmann

Ellmann was born in Highland Park, Michigan, the second of three sons of James Isaac Ellman, a lawyer, and his wife Jeanette (née Barsook). His father was a Romanian Jew and his mother was a Ukrainian Jew, originally from Kiev. Ellmann served in the United States Navy and Office of Strategic Services during World War II.[2] He studied at Yale University, receiving his B.A. in 1939, his M.A. in 1941, and his PhD (for which he won the John Addison Porter Prize) in 1947.[3] In 1947 he was awarded a B.Litt degree (an earlier form of the M.Litt) from the University of Dublin (Trinity College), where he was resident while researching his biography of Yeats.[4] As a Yale undergraduate at Jonathan Edwards College, Ellmann was a member of Phi Beta Kappa (scholastic honor society); Chi Delta Theta (literary honor society); and, with James Jesus Angleton, a member of the Executive Editorial Board of the Yale Literary Magazine. He achieved "Scholar of the Second Rank" (current equivalent: magna cum laude). The 1939 Yale Banner undergraduate yearbook published an untitled Ellmann account (similar in concept and style to Oscar Wilde's parables which Ellmann later cited in his 1987 biography Oscar Wilde) of a chagrined Joseph, husband of Mary, and Jesus Christ's custodial father:

Joseph was no match for the angel and for Mary's flattering tears. He felt a wince of disappointment at the idea that she had had a vision too, but then she was his wife, and perhaps the whole family now had the prophetic gift. He would have to try it out, on the harvest. Meanwhile he would seek to forget his jealousy, despite the fact that the story sounded a bit fantastic to a reasonable man, which he guessed he was, and it would be well not to talk about it much outside. It was better to leave things the way they were. Not much of a wedding night, but one could tell white lies about that to one's friends.[5]

Ellman later returned to teach at Yale, and there with Charles Feidelson Jr., he edited the important anthology, The Modern Tradition. He earlier taught at Northwestern, and at 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, Oxford, 1970–1987, and an extraordinary fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford from 1984 until his death. Additionally, he was a Fellow of the British Academy.

Ellmann used his knowledge of the Irish milieu to bring together four literary luminaries in Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (1987), a collection of essays first delivered at the Library of Congress.

His wife, the former Mary Donoghue (c. 1921 – 1989), whom he married in 1949, was an essayist. The couple had three children: Stephen (b. 1951), Maud (b. 1954), and Lucy (b. 1956), the first two became academics and the third a novelist and teacher of writing.

Ellmann died of motor neurone disease in Oxford on May 13, 1987, at the age of 69.

Many of his collected papers, artifacts, and ephemera were acquired by the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives. Other manuscripts are housed in the Northwestern University's Library special collections department.

The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature at Emory University were established in his honor.[14]

This literature-related list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

As author

• Yeats: The Man And The Masks (1948; revised edition in 1979)
• The Identity of Yeats (1954; second edition in 1964)
• James Joyce (1959; revised edition in 1982)
• Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (1970)
• Literary Biography: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 4 May 1971 (1971)
• Ulysses on the Liffey (1972)
• Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (1976)
• The Consciousness of Joyce (1977)
• James Joyce's hundredth birthday, side and front views: A lecture delivered at the Library of Congress on March 10, 1982 (1982)
• Oscar Wilde at Oxford (1984)
• W. B. Yeats's Second Puberty; A Lecture Delivered At The Library Of Congress On April 2, 1984 (1985)
• Oscar Wilde (1987) [but see Horst Schroeder: Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann's OSCAR WILDE, second edition, revised and enlarged (2002)]
• Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (1987)
• a long the riverrun: Selected Essays (1988)

As editor

• My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years (Stanislaus Joyce; ed. Richard Ellmann, 1958)
• The Critical Writings of James Joyce (Eds. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, 1959)
• Edwardians and Late Victorians (Edited and with a Foreword by Richard Ellmann, 1960)
• The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature (with Charles Feidelson, Jr., 1965)
• Letters of James Joyce Vol. 2 (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1966)
• Letters of James Joyce Vol. 3 (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1966)
• Giacomo Joyce (James Joyce; ed. Richard Ellmann, 1968)
• Oscar Wilde: a Collection of Critical Essays (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1969)
• The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde" (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1969)
• The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (Eds. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, 1973)
• Selected Letters of James Joyce (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1975)
• Modern Poems: An Introduction to Poetry (Eds. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, 1976)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings by Oscar Wilde (Ed. Ellmann, 1982)

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

• University of Tulsa McFarlin Library's inventory of the Richard Ellmann collection housed in their special collections department
• Richard Ellmann Papers, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois