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Richard Ellmann: the man and his masks

James Joyce’s celebrated biographer seemed a mild man to fellow academics – but his ambition and steely self-belief made him a callous husband and father

17 May 2025

9:00 AM

17 May 2025

9:00 AM

Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker Zachary Leader

Harvard University Press, pp.464, 29.95

Richard Ellmann’s acclaimed life of James Joyce was published in 1959, with a revised and expanded edition appearing in 1982. The first edition, the work of an ambitious young American academic, received what Ellmann’s editor at Oxford University Press described as ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’.

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