James Joyce

Richard Ellmann's James Joyce is routinely called the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century, and the claim, made by Anthony Burgess among many others, has survived every challenge since 1959. Ellmann had what no later biographer can have: the living witnesses. He interviewed Joyce's family, friends, enemies, and drinking companions across Europe, won the cooperation of the estate, and gathered letters and papers with a collector's tenacity, and he fused it all into a narrative that reads like a great novel about a man who behaved like a character in one. Here is the whole improbable life: the Dublin boyhood among a downwardly spiraling family, the elopement with Galway chambermaid Nora Barnacle on almost no acquaintance, the decades of borrowed money and rented rooms in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, the battles over Ulysses with printers, censors, and pirates, the failing eyes, the daughter's madness, and through it all the cold unbreakable purpose that produced Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Ellmann's mastery of the work matches his mastery of the life; each chapter opens with an epigraph from Finnegans Wake, and his readings show how relentlessly Joyce transmuted the people around him into literature, often to their fury. The book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1960, and Ellmann's revised edition of 1982, thick with newly found material, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2025 Harvard published an entire book about this book, Zachary Leader's Ellmann's Joyce, a tribute few biographies in any language could earn.