Ellmann's Joyce

[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 validity and critical value of the often maligned genre of literary biography. -- M. A. Orthofer * Australian Book Review * A riveting glimpse inside the biography writing process, this scintillates. * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * An engaging and interesting double biography, of man and work. -- M. A. Orthofer * Complete Review * An ingeniously conceived and beautifully executed book by a preeminent literary biographer. It is compulsively readable as well as profoundly sympathetic, drawing a memorable portrait of a fascinating man and his intellectual milieu, and making an important statement about literary biography, its form, uses, and implications. A remarkable achievement. -- R. F. Foster, author of <i>W. B. Yeats: A Life</i> A biography of a biographer by a biographer is, for a biographer like myself, a welcome, exciting, and above all rare event. Though the story is hardly ever told, Zachary Leader knows that what goes into the making of a great biography is often as much of a story as the story itself. With Ellmann’s Joyce, Leader shows how biographers think and work, and how their thinking and working shapes the posthumous destinies of those they write about. -- Benjamin Moser, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning <i>Sontag: Her Life and Work</i> Zachary Leader's biography of Richard Ellmann uncovers the struggles and secrets of Ellmann's life with great empathy and inimitable panache. Objective and affectionate, gossipy and grand, this book is a great read. -- Elaine Showalter, author of <i>The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography</i> Zachary Leader has given us the gift of explanation without simplification. This is a masterpiece of insight and dignified audacity, sure to immortalize its subject—the art of literary biography and one of its greatest practitioners, Richard Ellmann. -- Declan Kiberd, author of <i>Ulysses and Us</i>