Literature
Richard Ellmann
1918–1987 · literary biographer, critic, professor
Highland Park-born biographer of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, whose Joyce is often called the greatest literary biography of the 20th century.
- Born
Highland Park, Michigan- Died
Oxford, England
aged 69- Birth name
- Richard David Ellmann
- Detroit years
- 1918–1930s
- Field
- Literature
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Ellmann was born in 1918 in Highland Park, the auto-factory city surrounded by Detroit, the second of three sons of a Romanian-born Jewish lawyer, James Ellman, and his wife Jeanette Barsook. He grew up there in the boom years of Ford's Highland Park Plant before leaving for Yale and wartime service. His career took him to Northwestern, Yale, Emory and finally Oxford, where he held the Goldsmiths' chair of English. His James Joyce (1959) won the National Book Award and set a new standard for literary biography; his Oscar Wilde, finished just before his death from ALS in 1987, won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. His brother Erwin Ellmann remained in Detroit as a prominent civil-liberties lawyer.
Highlights
- James Joyce (1959): National Book Award; revised edition won the James Tait Black Prize
- Oscar Wilde (1987): Pulitzer Prize for Biography (1989)
- Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford
- Also wrote major studies of W. B. Yeats