When Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce hit the shelves in 1959, the sheer size of the book (842 pages, 100 longer than Ulysses ) was as dazzling as the degree of detail. Joyce, who had been dead for 18 years, vividly inhabited its chapters, getting drunk, going blind, spending money, spiting enemies, cogitating, and, of course, creating a series of works that immediately made literary history. Moving briskly across the first half of the 20th century (not just a single day in Dublin), Ellmann spun a tale about the formation of a writer whose name could be mentioned in the same breath as Homer’s without irony.
Ellmann owed his triumph, in part, to being in the right place at the right time. By the early 1950s, he had spent a year at Trinity College Dublin researching his prizewinning dissertation on William Butler Yeats, received a Ph.D. from Yale, and become an ambitious 30-something professor at Northwestern University. Yeats’s widow was ready to provide introductions in Dublin; Joyce’s most important patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and his dear friend Maria Jolas released a trove of unpublished letters. Stanislaus Joyce, his brother, had shared material from his diaries and unfinished memoir. Nelly Joyce, Stanislaus’s widow, unleashed holy-grail-grade manuscripts; so did Jolas. And Sylvia Beach, a fellow American and the fearless publisher of Ulysses, was still knocking around Paris willing to entertain questions.
You also need charm, lots of it, to make a biography like James Joyce happen. Ellmann, a virtuosic schmoozer, could get people to do his bidding without ever seeming too pushy. A delivery of coal during the winter; some chocolates, cigarettes, cocoa, or tea in any season—accompanied by a carefully worded request, such offerings could go a long way when he needed to gain (or restrict) access to material.
James Joyce (Ellmann wisely heeded his mother’s advice to drop the subtitle, The Hawk-Like Man) was immediately recognized as a masterpiece—not just a comprehensive life-and-art account of Joyce, but a genre breakthrough. Developing a style that was at once detached and ornate, Ellmann works as a historical novelist, using facts as a springboard for a subtle psychological portrayal intertwined with layered critical interpretations.
Consider, for instance, the moment when the young, unknown Joyce arrives in Rome to take a job at a bank. It’s 1906, a few years after his voluntary exile from Ireland; Joyce is all but penniless at 24. Ellmann wants to capture the way the eternal city, strewn with ruins, acts on someone who is homesick. Joyce’s “head was filled with a sense of the too successful encroachment of the dead upon the living city,” he writes. “There was a disrupting parallel in the way that Dublin, buried behind him, was haunting his thoughts.” Like the newly married, disillusioned Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the young, impressionable Joyce feels psychologically unmoored by his time in Rome. He loves and hates Ireland all at once, and out of this emotional struggle, he will end up producing “The Dead,” the final story in Dubliners. It is set in Dublin, but through Ellmann, we come to appreciate that it is also a ghost story with Roman roots—and a prelude to the universal sweep of Ulysses.
In his quest for a definitive biography of Joyce as a cosmopolitan artist, above the parochial fray, Ellmann downplayed Joyce’s interest in politics. In fact, before Joyce ever published a book, he wrote newspaper articles and delivered lectures in Italian about Irish nationalism and his disdain for British imperialism in his native country, work that shed helpful light on his fiction. “My political opinions,” he summed up in a letter to his brother, “are those of a Socialist artist.” His work is saturated with references to Irish history, politics, geography, and culture—rich in allusions, both explicit and puzzlelike, to major figures and events.
Still, to say that Ellmann is to Joyce what James Boswell is to Samuel Johnson is not too big a stretch: He didn’t arrive in time to befriend Joyce, but he got to the posthumous scene first; gathered fresh accounts; captured not just the context, but his subject’s character and his creative process. Not least, Ellmann emerged, as Boswell did, with a mold-breaking portrait that has retained an enduring power over the readers and scholars who have followed.
Ellmann the portraitist has now come in for a portrait of his own. (So did Boswell, though not until two centuries after his one-of-a-kind work was published.) In Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker, Zachary Leader—who has written engaging lives of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow—has cobbled together a curious two-part chronicle. Part one is a meticulously researched account, woodenly rendered, of Ellmann’s not particularly colorful life up until 1952, when he began work on his Joyce biography. In part two, Leader explores in detail topics involved in the book’s creation—sleuthing methods, rivals, reviewers—as well as its afterlife (a second edition appeared in 1982, the centenary of Joyce’s birth, by which time errors had been unearthed, critiques launched). A coda skims over Ellmann’s life until his death, in 1987 (and includes what the publisher’s blurb bills as “a startling secret,” which can be revealed without spoiling a thing: The happily married Ellmann had a late-in-life affair after his wife, Mary, suffered an aneurism and was confined to a wheelchair).
What you won’t come away with are insights into why Ellmann was so fascinated by Irish writers (he went on to write about Oscar Wilde too), or how the intellectual questions he asked about his subjects might illuminate his own life and scholarly trajectory. Surely Ellmann’s Jewishness in the WASP-dominated precincts of elite literary studies, I found myself thinking, played a role in priming his interest in the outsiders he wrote about. Leader doesn’t pursue such potential connections.
So why bother with a biography of a biographer who spent decades doing what academics usually do: reading, researching, writing, teaching, repeat? If nostalgia was part of the project’s attraction for Harvard University Press, that’s entirely understandable. Ellmann and his achievement represent a moment in American cultural history when pulling off a book like that was possible: a door stopper with appeal inside the academy and out. When James Joyce appeared, the rigidly narrow siloing of literary fields still lay ahead; for medieval scholars, 18th-century historians, and Romanticists alike, Ellmann’s book was an event not to be missed.
The biography made Joyce approachable for generations of readers. And if some dove into Ellmann to avoid reading Joyce, others clung to Ellmann for dear life as they navigated the dense pages of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s wife, Nora, dismissed his last work as nothing but “chop suey,” but Ellmann uses anecdotes and snippets of Joyce’s conversations as well as written passages to make it cohere. Finnegans Wake, in his skillful hands, is a tapestry of all the works Joyce ever wrote, the final and protracted project of a writer who could never stop thinking about Ireland.
For Ulysses, too, Ellmann showed how the network of cryptic allusions and the experiments with syntax were part of a bigger plan to capture something true about the intricate crosscurrents of life. He wove together hundreds of biographical stories (some apocryphal) and concise plot summaries so that the critical interpretation was barely noticeable. Ellmann had an “intelligence of expression,” as his friend Ellsworth Mason noted, that obscured his tendency to lean heavily on the fiction as a source of facts about its author’s life.
What kept me turning Leader’s pages were the glimpses of the academic Atlantis that Ellmann inhabited. Running in the background of this meta-biography is a history of literature as a discipline in America. Ellmann came of age during a period of unprecedented abundance. From 1920 to 1970, the higher-education professoriat grew tenfold, and a new university press was founded every year or so. Thanks to the legendary GI Bill (which, after Ellmann’s stint in the Office of Strategic Services during the war, partially paid for his graduate work at Trinity College), undergraduate enrollment exploded, along with federal subsidies for university libraries under the National Defense Education Act.
As Ellmann was quietly assembling materials for his biography, specialization was on the rise in American literature departments, as the critic Erich Auerbach warned, auguring the decline of a general humanities education. Literary subfields that had been defined by genre or historical period were giving way to a narrower focus on single authors of much more recent vintage than Shakespeare and Milton. An infrastructure of professionalism—conferences, along with scholarly journals and societies—had begun to emerge. A writer like Joyce, whose works inspired exegetical devotion, was clearly at the forefront of likely 20th-century candidates for academic canonization, and the arrival of Ellmann’s biography as the 1950s ended helped spur his elevation to Saint James status in the postwar university.
But Ellmann himself was a Joycean avant la lettre. With no “Joyce industry” yet in place, he had the freedom to shape his subject as he chose. Leaf through the mass of footnotes at the back of James Joyce, and you’ll find fewer than 20 books of criticism in the mix. Citations abound of unpublished archival sources—mounds of letters, diaries, telegrams—and exclusive interviews. Size counted for the clout of a pioneering endeavor. At one point, Ellmann had envisioned “a short book of perhaps 150 pages,” combining biography with reminiscences from Joyce’s contemporaries. By 1953, when he signed a contract with Oxford University Press, nervous about the huge $1,500 advance, no competitors were on the horizon, and he had something substantially larger in mind that could serve as an introduction to a barely plumbed subject.
His ambition paid off, not just in attracting a broad audience, but in advancing his career, at a time when crossover appeal added to academic luster. The accolades poured in for his monumental book, printed on large-format pages with a dark-blue cover and gold lettering on the spine. Ellmann won the National Book Award for biography in 1960, and dream-job offers from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford (where he landed in 1970) soon followed. Like Lionel Trilling before him, Ellmann leaned out of the ivory tower and gained stature within it as departments of literature were specializing.
By the early ’80s, when the revised edition appeared and he was at work on Wilde, literary studies had already moved in a very different direction. A decade earlier, Theory (with a capital T ) had arrived from France, and soon Lacanians and Freudians; Marxists and feminists; deconstructionists, queer theorists, and postcolonialists had flooded the field. Whereas the focus on single authors had been a boon for a book like James Joyce, the emphasis on Theory proved a bane. The previous approaches to literary works were now suspect, and new questions came to the fore: about their status as commodities in a capitalist system; about the text itself as part of a power struggle and language as an expression of the unconscious. Biography Ellmann-style was left looking hopelessly naive in its effort to understand the work by understanding its writer’s life. The author was dead, as Roland Barthes put it, so what was the point of searching for intentionality behind the words on the page?
When I entered graduate school in the late ’90s, Joyce was a dartboard for every theoretical trend available. Reading him (and most major authors) in a suitably cutting-edge way entailed two steps: picking an available theory and applying it. In Columbia University’s English department, where I was and where theoretical allegiances were fierce, I still went ahead and read Ellmann, considering it a guilty pleasure, almost like cozying up with a romance novel. But I shouldn’t have felt apologetic, nor should Leader, who feels compelled to explain that Ellmann “had little time” for theory. Ellmann didn’t need to make time for theory. James Joyce has long outlived many of the theoretical interventions that seemed so urgent back then, propelling academic careers even as they deterred nonspecialists from reading Joyce.
Ellmann’s Joyce is not just a product of its era, but an index of our age. No responsible adviser in a doctoral program in English now would recommend a single-author dissertation if a tenure-track job in the profession is the goal—an ever more daunting one, given the implosion of literature departments, and of so many disciplines across the humanities. In a tighter job market, students aiming to be professors now need to demonstrate range as they pursue a particular problem or literary historical period.
The fate of Ellmann and his Joyce biography highlights the disorienting transformation of literature as a field of study. The canons dismantled during the Theory incursion of the 1970s and ’80s introduced a more inclusive world of letters, even as the upheaval left English departments fragmented. Harold Bloom, a lightning rod for controversy, responded with The Western Canon in the mid-1990s. In his survey of mostly white, male authors, he argued against the so-called school of resentment, which believes that literature can “save society” or drive social change and reform. The response was swift, and Bloom became a punching bag for leftist critics, who valued literature’s power to deliver social and political messages for the underrepresented.
Joyce has made the cut in the 21st century, but just barely. I teach graduate students, most of whom arrive without ever having read a story from Dubliners, let alone tackled Ulysses. Literary historians and critics of various stripes might be willing to acknowledge his value, but in academia, Joyce has long since become one more specialized topic. Those already intimidated by the difficulty are likely to be further put off by the experts’ gatekeeping.
Given how rarely literary scholars and critics these days read outside their field, just imagine the difficulty of reaching a wider nonacademic audience, among whom reading at all is an endangered pastime. A National Endowment for the Arts survey revealed that fewer than half of American adults read more than a single book in 2022. If the data were refined further to rank reading by genre, I’m willing to bet that literary criticism would be close to the bottom. Which makes Ellmann’s achievement all the more remarkable.
Being able to shape strong sentences, elegantly weave together plot strands, and bring characters to life (even with some inventive fudging)—that may sound like the obvious recipe for any good story. Still, it’s no small feat, especially if you add in the pressure to provide interpretive guidance. All the way back in 1938, when he was a Yale senior, Ellmann was convinced that he had to choose between two professions: academic or writer. Thankfully, he managed to be both.
This article appears in the July 2025 print edition with the headline “The Canonization of James Joyce.”
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