National Book Award Non Fiction Winner
James Joyce
by Richard Ellmann
Summary
An exhaustive, novelistically rich biography of the Irish writer who reshaped twentieth-century fiction, tracing Joyce from Dublin childhood through the Trieste, Zurich, and Paris years that produced "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake." Ellmann interviewed surviving family, lovers, and friends and aligned every episode of Joyce's life with the corresponding pages of his work, showing how raw experience became myth. The book is widely regarded as one of the great literary biographies in English.
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Historical Context & Significance
Ellmann's work set a new "gold standard" for literary biography; he was the first to show how Joyce's incredibly mundane daily life was the direct source of his experimental fiction.