18 Facts About Richard Ellmann

Richard Ellmann won the US National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce, one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century.

Richard Ellmann was born in Highland Park, Michigan, the second of three sons of James Isaac Ellman, a lawyer, and his wife Jeanette.

Richard Ellmann's father was a Romanian Jew and his mother was a Ukrainian Jew from Kyiv.

Richard Ellmann served in the United States Navy and Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

Richard Ellmann achieved "Scholar of the Second Rank".

Richard Ellmann felt a wince of disappointment at the idea that she had had a vision too, but then she was his wife, and perhaps the whole family now had the prophetic gift.

Richard Ellmann would have to try it out, on the harvest.

Richard Ellmann later returned to teach at Yale, and there he and Charles Feidelson Jr.

Richard Ellmann earlier taught at Northwestern and the University of Oxford before serving as Emory University's Robert W Woodruff Professor from 1980 until his death.

Richard Ellmann used his knowledge of the Irish milieu to bring together four literary luminaries in Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett, a collection of essays first delivered at the Library of Congress.

Richard Ellmann's wife, the former Mary Donoghue, whom he married in 1949, was an essayist.

Richard Ellmann died of motor neurone disease in Oxford on May 13,1987, at the age of 69.

The University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, acquired many of Richard Ellmann's collected papers, artifacts, and ephemera.

In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann drew on conversations with the poet's widow, George Yeats, along with thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts, to write a critical examination of Yeats's life.

Richard Ellmann is perhaps best known for his literary biography of James Joyce.

Richard Ellmann completed his cradle-to-grave biography of Oscar Wilde shortly before his death.

Richard Ellmann was posthumously awarded both a US National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Nevertheless, because Richard Ellmann rushed to finish it before his death, he was unable to thoroughly revise it, and the book contains many factual errors, the most infamous of which is the claim that a photograph of the Hungarian diva Alice Guszalewicz depicts Wilde dressed as Salome.