Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, published in 1959, was hailed by Anthony Burgess as ‘the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century’. Frank Kermode thought the book would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a prediction that was, if anything, too cautious. The biography won the National Book Award and durably secured Joyce’s standing as a pre-eminent modernist.

Zachary Leader will discuss his new book, Ellmann’s Joyce, in conversation with Hermione Lee. The book offers a ‘biography of a biography’, tracing how Richard Ellmann came to Joyce, secured the cooperation of the family and estate, assembled papers and interviews, managed publishers, thwarted competitors, and balanced narrative with literary analysis. Leader also examines the biographer himself—publicly celebrated and privately admirable, yet with a startling secret life—and sets out a broader case for Ellmann’s intellectual and artistic claims, and for the value of literary biography more generally.