Richard David Ellmann was a prominent American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce , which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century; its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A liberal humanist, Ellmann's academic work generally focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century. Ellmann was born at Highland Park, Michigan, the second of the three sons of... James Isaac Ellmann, lawyer, a Jewish Romanian immigrant, and his wife, Jeanette Barsook, an immigrant from Kiev. He served in the United States Navy during World War II. He studied at Yale University, receiving his B.A. , his M.A. and his PhD. for which he won the John Addison Porter Prize. In 1947 he was awarded a B.Litt degree from the University of Dublin , where he was resident while researching his biography of Yeats.
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