About Richard Ellmann
Richard David Ellmann, FBA, was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition won James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focuses on the major modernist writers of the 20th century. 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. In 1947, he was awarded a B.Litt. degree (an earlier form of the M.Litt) by Trinity College Dublin, where he was resident while researching his biography of Yeats. The first two became academics and Lucy a novelist and writing teacher.
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