James Joyce

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.