Illinois Authors

Blackwell Pub., Malden, MA ; 2008.

Hamish Hamilton, London : 1987.

G. Braziller, New York : 1988, ©1986.

Oxford University Press, New York : 1982.

Upon its publication in 1959, this book was recognized as the definitive study of Joyce's life. In honor of the James Joyce Centenary in 1982, the author published a new edition, thoroughly revised and expanded. Ellmann's original research led him from Dublin to Joyce's haunts in Europe. In the process he discovered many people who served as partial models for Joyce's characters, networks of association in which they were placed, and he shows how Joyce converted this raw material into brilliant works of fiction. Ellmann gives a fascinating account of the literary milieu in which Joyce worked, and discusses his relationship with Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, Hemingway, Proust, Pound, Larbaud, and Fitzgerald. His dramatic portrait of Joyce as son, lover, husband. father, and artist provides the key to understanding Joyce's revolutionary writings. This new edition, for a new generation, Ellmann feels "may help to assuage some of the curiosity that still persists about this bizarre and wonderful creature who turned literature and language on its end."--Publisher description.

Books on Tape, Newport Beach, CA : ℗1998.

Almost twenty years in the making, this book is the definitive life of its Oscar Wilde. He was a genius who had a profound capacity to delight, entertain and please, as well as an arrogance that crippled his judgment and that in the end brought him down.

Knopf : New York : 1988, ©1987.

In this long-awaited biography, Wilde the legendary Victorian--brilliant writer and conversationalist, reckless flouter of social and sexual conventions--is brought to life. More astute and forbearing, yet more fallible than legend has allowed, Wilde is given here the dimensions of a modern hero. The author depicts Wilde's comet-like ascent on the Victorian scene and his equally dramatic sudden eclipse. He presents Wilde's Irish background, the actresses to whom he paid court, his unfortunate wife and lovers, his clothes, coiffures, and the decor of his rooms. The saga of his 1882 American tour is recounted with a wealth of new details; also his later impact on the bastions of the French literary establishment. The London of the Nineties, of Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites, Lillie Langtry and the Prince of Wales, is evoked alongside Paris of the "belle époque" and the Greece, Italy and North Africa of Wilde's travels. This critical account of Wilde's entire oeuvre shows him as the proponent of a radical new aesthetic who was perilously at odds with Victorian society. After his period of success and daring, the fatal love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas is followed by exposure, imprisonment, a few wretched years abroad and death in exile. The tragic end of Wilde's life leaves the reader with a sense of compassion and grief for the protagonist.

Faber, London : ©1964.

Faber, London : 1984.

Oxford University Press New York : Dec. 1986.

Annotation

Oxford University Press, Oxford : 1979.

A critical biography of the great Irish poet traces his intellectual growth and relates his mystical concerns and involvement in public affairs to his poetry.