Life
Ellmann was born at Highland Park, Michigan, the second of the three sons (there were no daughters) of James Isaac Ellmann, lawyer, a Jewish Romanian immigrant, and his wife, Jeanette Barsook, an immigrant from Kiev. He served in the United States Navy during World War II. He studied at Yale University, receiving his B.A. (1939), his M.A. (1941) and his PhD. (1947) for which he won the John Addison Porter Prize. In 1947 he was awarded a B.Litt degree (an earlier form of the M.Litt) from the University of Dublin (Trinity College), where he was resident while researching his biography of Yeats.
He would later return to teach at Yale, and there with Charles Feidelson, Jr., he edited the extraordinarily important anthology, The Modern Tradition. He earlier taught at Northwestern, and at the University of Oxford, before serving (for a considerable stipend) as Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Professor from 1980 till his death.
He was Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford University, 1970–1984, then Professor Emeritus, and a fellow at New College, Oxford, 1970-1987.
Ellmann used his knowledge of the Irish milieu to bring together four literary luminaries in Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (1987), a collection of essays first delivered at the Library of Congress.
His wife, Mary (c. 1921 - 1989), whom he married in 1949, was an essayist. The couple had three children: Stephen (b. 1951), Maud (b. 1954), and Lucy (b. 1956), the first two being academics and the third a novelist and teacher of writing.
Ellmann died of motor neurone disease in Oxford, aged 69.
Many of his collected papers, artifacts, and ephemera were acquired by the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives. Other manuscripts are housed in the Northwestern University's Library special collections department.
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