Richard Ellmann

Richard David Ellmann (1918–1987) was an American literary critic and biographer born in Highland Park, Michigan, renowned for his definitive biographies of Irish writers James Joyce (James Joyce, 1959, National Book Award), Oscar Wilde (Oscar Wilde, 1987, posthumous Pulitzer Prize), and William Butler Yeats (Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 1948). He earned degrees from Yale University and taught at Northwestern, Yale, Oxford (Goldsmiths' Professor), and Emory, becoming a Fellow of the British Academy.