A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year The story of the most acclaimed literary biography of the twentieth century―an ingeniously plotted, behind-the-scenes account of how the literary critic and scholar Richard Ellmann shaped James Joyce’s reputation. Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, published in 1959, was hailed by Anthony Burgess as “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” Frank Kermode thought the book would “fix Joyce’s image for a generation,” a prediction that was if anything too cautious. The biography won the National Book Award and durably secured Joyce’s standing as a preeminent modernist. Ellmann’s Joyce provides the biography of the biography, exploring how Ellmann came to his subject, gained the cooperation of Joyce’s family and estate, shrewdly, doggedly collected vital papers and interviews, placated publishers, thwarted competitors, and carefully balanced narrative with literary analysis. Ellmann’s Joyce also removes the veil from the biographer―richly rewarded in public, admirable in private life, but also possessed of a startling secret life. An eminent biographer himself, Zachary Leader constructs a powerful argument not only in support of Ellmann’s intellectual and artistic claims but also on behalf of literary biography generally. In the process, he takes readers on a rare tour through midcentury publishing houses in New York and London, as well as the corridors and classrooms of elite universities, from Yale to Oxford. The influence of Ellmann’s book, recognized instantly, persists to this day, among literary scholars and Joyce fans alike. Filled with surprising details, tales of intrigue from the heyday of literary publishing, and intimate portraits of the Joyce and Ellmann families, Ellmann’s Joyce is as immersive as a walk around town with Leopold Bloom and as moving as the thickly drifted snow on Michael Furey’s grave. “The British critic and scholar Christopher Ricks said of Ellmann’s biography that it ‘engages every aspect of Joyce’s life and interests,’ from the amatory to the political to the domestic…‘Ellmann’s Joyce’ does the same for its likable subject.” ― James Campbell , Wall Street Journal “[An] evenhanded, well-written and sometimes provocative biography.” ― Michael Dirda , Washington Post “Leader explores in detail topics involved in the book’s creation―sleuthing methods, rivals, reviewers―as well as its afterlife…Running in the background of this meta-biography is a history of literature as a discipline in America.” ― Eric Bulson , The Atlantic “An unusual and engaging book, half an account of Ellmann’s life leading up to the Joyce biography, and half a detailed history of the book’s composition and its subsequent place within Joycean scholarship.” ― Seamus Perry , London Review of Books “I have always been grateful to Ellmann for taking such a democratizing approach to this most despotic of authors, just as I am now to Leader for following suit…what Zachary Leader gives us is a richly researched, nuanced portrait of the earlier life and working processes of a writer who not only shone light into one of the great literary minds of the twentieth century, but, in the process, became one in his own right.” ― Eimear McBride , Times Literary Supplement “Leader’s meta-biographical approach offers a case study, in effect, for the stakes of thinking about biography as an art…Leader has written an engaging and, moreover, fair account of what was probably the most important literary biography of the 20th century.” ― Michelle Taylor , The Nation “The way in which Ellmann’s remarkable biography came into being is the subject of an unusual and eminently humane new book by Zachary Leader, himself a distinguished practitioner of the erudite yet highly readable doorstopper school of biography that Ellmann pioneered, via his lives of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow…[offers] a lucid account of what makes Ellmann such a consummate practitioner of an art of writing that, Leader clearly feels, does not always receive the respect that it deserves.” ― Joe Moshenska , The Observer “A wise, balanced and utterly compelling biography.” ― Frances Wilson , The Spectator “An admirable feat of literary excavation, Leader goes behind the scenes and reveals not just how the biography came to be but what Ellmann himself was like, as both a family man and as a Northwestern University scholar…You don’t need to love Joyce to enjoy Ellmann’s Joyce. ” ― Jim Kelly , Airmail “A fascinating account of how the biographer came to write his magnum opus.” ― Marjorie Brennan , Irish Examiner “Takes readers on a dazzling intellectual tour…A singular achievement worthy of notice, both in its exploration of character and as a defense of the biographer’s art.” ― Michael O'Donnell , American Scholar “[Leader] writes not only with great respect for the labour involved, but with a sense of its understated drama… makes a compelling case for the