Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of James Joyce is a triumph. Regularly described as the greatest literary biography of the 20th century, it weaves together the threads of Joyce’s life and work in a manner that obliges all but the most sceptical of readers to acknowledge their mutual dependence. 

By demonstrating how much Joyce drew on his own experiences in his fiction, Ellmann helped to turn biography into an instrument of serious critical endeavour. In the 1950s, literary biography sometimes sold well, but was not well regarded within academic circles. Recourse to facts or speculation about authorial intention was scorned by the dominant New Critics, as it was by partisans of modernist impersonality such as Hugh Kenner, whose anti-biographical approach made it easier for him to champion Ezra Pound than would otherwise have been the case. Ellmann’s James Joyce changed all of this, and would in due course outlive ‘the death of the author’, as proclaimed by theorists like Barthes and Foucault.

Zachary Leader is himself a distinguished biographer whose backlist includes lives of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow. In Ellmann’s Joyce, he offers an extended homage to a master in his field – one who, like him, was born in America but made a home in England. The strength and weakness