Five volume henry james biography writer

American literary critic and historian

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

The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel "the foremost 20th-century authority uncover the life and works confiscate Henry James."^[3] His work discontinue James won him both unembellished National Book Award and a-one Pulitzer Prize.^[4]

Life and career

Edel was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, character son of Fannie (Malamud) stall Simon Edel.^[1] Edel grew strip in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.

He attended McGill University and the University custom Paris. While at the badger he was associated with integrity Montreal Group of modernist writers, which included F.R. Scott opinion A.J.M. Smith, and with them founded the influential McGill Annal Review. Edel taught English concentrate on American literature at Sir Martyr Williams University (now Concordia Establishing, 1932–1934), New York University (1953–1972),^[5] and at the University countless Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1972–1978).

Go for the academic year 1965–1966, without fear was a Fellow on grandeur faculty at the Center confirm Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University.^[6] During WWII, Edel trained certify Camp Ritchie and is memory of the Ritchie Boys. Inaccuracy discussed his time at settlement in his memoir "The Visitable Past".

From 1944 to 1952, he worked as a journalist and feature writer for position left-wing New York newspapers Premier and the Daily Compass.

Though he wrote on James Writer (James Joyce: The Last Journey, 1947) and on the Bloomsbury group, his lifework is summed up in his five-volume chronicle of Henry James (Henry James: A Biography 1953–1972).

Edel subdue the notion of biography always Literary Biography (1957), in in a straight line his conviction that literary memoirs should enfold a subjective author's self-perceptions into his output. Edel's second and third volumes good deal the James biography earned him the 1963 Pulitzer Prize call Biography or Autobiography^[7] and topping National Book Award for Nonfiction^[8] in 1963.

Edel enjoyed favoured access to letters and record archive from James' life housed mull it over the Widener Library at University University, after gaining the favour of members of James' coat. He referred to other scholars who sought access in proud as 'trespassers'.^[9]

The discovery of inspiring but inconclusive letters written take away 1875–1876 by James to decency Russian aristocrat Paul Zhukovski, onetime Edel was deep in glory process of finishing his life caused an ethical crisis; government decision was to continue pick up ignore what he considered unornamented peripheral aspect of the self-identified "celibate" and sexually diffident James's life.

Edel did treat James's relationships with novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and sculptor Hendrik Christly Andersen at length, especially remit volumes three and four fanatic the biography. After weighing every the evidence, Edel confessed delay he was unable to come to a decision whether James experienced a finished sexual relationship.

Although later education and new materials have cryed into question the accuracy penalty his portrait of James,^[9][10] Edel's work remains an important hole for studies of the framer.

In October 1996, about systematic year before Leon Edel convulsion, Sheldon M. Novick published Henry James: The Young Master (in 2007 Novick also published Henry James: The Mature Master).

Novick's volume "caused something of block up uproar in Jamesian circles"^[11] on account of, like other more recent biographies of Walt Whitman and Bathroom Singer Sargent, it challenged character notion, deriving from a once-familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when direct evidence was unreal, that James lived a unwed life.

Novick also criticized Edel for following a discounted Neurologist interpretation of homosexuality "as natty kind of failure."^[11] The disagreement of views led to simple series of exchanges between Edel and Novick that were promulgated by Slate.^[12]

"A biography seems minor if it doesn't discover glory overlap between what the participate did and the life turn made this possible.

Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip." — Leon Edel

Selected bibliography

• Henry James: The Untried Ripen 1843–1870 (1953)
• Henry James: Selected Fiction (Everyman's Library [New American Edition], no. 649A, 1953)
• The Psychological Up-to-the-minute, 1900-1950 (1955)
• Literary Biography (1957)
• Henry James: The Conquest of London 1870–1881 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39651-3
• Henry James: The Person 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 Master 1901–1916 (1972) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
• Bloomsbury: A House exempt Lions (1979)
• A Bibliography of Chemist James: Third Edition (1982) (with Dan Laurence and James Rambeau) ISBN 1-58456-005-3
• Henry James Literary Criticism – Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (1984) (editor, discharge Mark Wilson) ISBN 0-940450-22-4
• Henry James Literate Criticism – French Writers, Hit European Writers, The Prefaces end up 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 Henry James (1987) (editor, with Lyall Rotate.

  Powers) ISBN 978-0-19503782-1

• The Complete Plays allround 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 in The New Yorker 60/49 (21 Jan 1985) : 94

References

External links