Yes I Will Read Ulysses Yes

Summary

When Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce hit the shelves in 1959, the sheer size of the book (842 pages, 100 longer than Ulysses ) was as dazzling as the degree of detail. Joyce, who had been dead for 18 years, vividly inhabited its chapters, getting drunk, going blind, spending money, spiting enemies, cogitating, and, of course, creating a series of works that immediately made literary history. Moving briskly across the first half of the 20th century (not just a single day in Dublin), Ellmann spun a tale about the formation of a writer whose name could be mentioned in the same breath as Homer’s without irony.Explore the July 2025 IssueCheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read.View MoreEllmann owed his triumph, in part, to being in the right place at the right time. By the early 1950s, he had spent a year at Trinity College Dublin researching his prizewinning dissertation on William Butler Yeats, received a Ph.D. from Yale, and become an ambitious 30-something professor at Northwestern University. Yeats’s widow was ready to provide introductions in Dublin; Joyce’s most important patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and his dear friend Maria Jolas released a trove of unpublished letters. Stanislaus Joyce, his brother, had shared material from his diaries and unfinished memoir. Nelly Joyce, Stanislaus’s widow, unleashed holy-grail-grade manuscripts; so did Jolas. And Sylvia Beach, a fellow American and the fearless publisher of Ulysses, was still knocking around Paris willing to entertain questions.From the April 1957 issue: Letters of James JoyceYou also need charm, lots of it, to make a biography like James Joyce happen. Ellmann, a virtuosic schmoozer, could get people to do his bidding without ever seeming too pushy. A delivery of coal during the winter; some chocolates, cigarettes, cocoa, or tea in any season—accompanied by a carefully worded request, such offerings could go a long way when he needed to gain (or restrict) access to material.James Joyce (El...