Richard Ellmann

As its subtitle suggests, Ellmann’s Joyce: The biography of a masterpiece and its maker is two books in one. Zachary Leader spends the first half recounting the early life and career of Richard Ellmann (1918-87), one of the great luminaries of postwar literary studies. The second half delivers the promised ‘biography of a masterpiece’, in the form of a detailed account of Ellmann researching and writing his most celebrated work, James Joyce (1959; revised 1982), a book still considered a monument of Joycean scholarship and a paragon of the literary biographer’s art.