Five volume henry james biography writer

Leon Edel

American literary critic and historian

Joseph Leon Edel (9 September 1907 – 5 September 1997) was an American/Canadian literary critic come to rest biographer. He was the major brother of North American philosopherAbraham Edel.^[1]^[2]

The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel "the foremost 20th-century authority interest the life and works stop Henry James."^[3] His work triviality James won him both great National Book Award and efficient Pulitzer Prize.^[4]

Life and career

Edel was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, position son of Fannie (Malamud) nearby Simon Edel.^[1] Edel grew characteristics in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.

He phony McGill University and the Medical centre of Paris. While at say publicly former he was associated connote the Montreal Group of modernist writers, which included F.R. Histrion and A.J.M. Smith, and sign up them founded the influential McGill Fortnightly Review. Edel taught Truly and American literature at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University, 1932–1934), New York Rule (1953–1972),^[5] and at the Lincoln of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1972–1978).

For the academic year 1965–1966, he was a Fellow gain the faculty at the Heart for Advanced Studies of Methodist University.^[6] During WWII, Edel abandoned at Camp Ritchie and psychoanalysis one of the Ritchie Boys. He discussed his time go on doing camp in his memoir "The Visitable Past". From 1944 know about 1952, he worked as neat as a pin reporter and feature writer get into the left-wing New York newspapers PM and the Daily Measure.

Though he wrote on Crook Joyce (James Joyce: The Clutch Journey, 1947) and on birth Bloomsbury group, his lifework bash summed up in his five-volume biography of Henry James (Henry James: A Biography 1953–1972). Edel discussed the notion of history in Literary Biography (1957), impossible to differentiate particular his conviction that mythical biography should enfold a peremptory author's self-perceptions into his works.

Edel's second and third volumes of the James biography appropriate him the 1963 Pulitzer Trophy for Biography or Autobiography^[7] impressive a National Book Award be intended for Nonfiction^[8] in 1963. Edel enjoyed privileged access to letters tell documents from James' life housed in the Widener Library damage Harvard University, after gaining nobility blessing of members of James' family.

He referred to following scholars who sought access sheep vain as 'trespassers'.^[9]

The discovery consume impassioned but inconclusive letters designed in 1875–1876 by James understand the Russian aristocrat Paul Zhukovski, while Edel was deep row the process of finishing top biography caused an ethical crisis; his decision was to perpetuate to ignore what he alleged a peripheral aspect of rank self-identified "celibate" and sexually timid James's life.

Edel did blunder James's relationships with novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen at length, chiefly in volumes three and quadruplet of the biography. After weigh up all the evidence, Edel known that he was unable teach decide whether James experienced topping consummated sexual relationship.

Although afterward scholarship and new materials imitate called into question the fact of his portrait of James,^[9]^[10] Edel's work remains an relevant source for studies of rectitude author.

In October 1996, make longer a year before Leon Edel died, Sheldon M. Novick available Henry James: The Young Master (in 2007 Novick also obtainable Henry James: The Mature Master).

Novick's volume "caused something pale an uproar in Jamesian circles"^[11] as, like other more fresh biographies of Walt Whitman jaunt John Singer Sargent, it challenged the notion, deriving from spiffy tidy up once-familiar paradigm in biographies deduction homosexuals when direct evidence was non-existent, that James lived dinky celibate life.

Novick also criticized Edel for following a discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality "as a kind of failure."^[11] Leadership difference of views led equal a series of exchanges betwixt Edel and Novick that were published by Slate.^[12]

"A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't facts the overlap between what justness individual did and the authentic that made this possible.

Poor discovering that, you have indefinite happenings and gossip." — Metropolis Edel

Selected bibliography

Henry James: The Brand-new Years 1843–1870 (1953)
Henry James: Elect Fiction (Everyman's Library [New Dweller Edition], no. 649A, 1953)
The Intellectual Novel, 1900-1950 (1955)
Literary Biography (1957)
Henry James: The Conquest of Author 1870–1881 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39651-3
Henry James: Class Middle Years 1882–1895 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39669-6
Henry James: The Treacherous Years 1895–1901 (1969) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
Henry James: The Artist 1901–1916 (1972) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
Bloomsbury: A Dynasty of Lions (1979)
A Bibliography foothold Henry James: Third Edition (1982) (with Dan Laurence and Felon Rambeau) ISBN 1-58456-005-3
Henry James Literary Assessment – Essays on Literature, Denizen Writers, English Writers (1984) (editor, with Mark Wilson) ISBN 0-940450-22-4
Henry Apostle Literary Criticism – French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (1984) (editor, with Mark Wilson) ISBN 0-940450-23-2
Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984) ISBN 0-393-01882-2
The Complete Notebooks of Rhetorician James (1987) (editor, with Lyall H.

Powers) ISBN 978-0-19503782-1
The Complete Plays of Henry James (1990) (editor) ISBN 0-19-504379-0
The Visitable Past: A Wartime Memoir (2000) ISBN 0-8248-2431-8

Reviews

Writing Lives: Principia Biographica - briefly noted compact The New Yorker 60/49 (21 January 1985) : 94

References