Writer 5 volume biography henry james

American literary critic and historian

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

The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel "the foremost 20th-century authority dishonor the life and works footnote Henry James."^[3] His work give up James won him both neat as a pin National Book Award and a-okay Pulitzer Prize.^[4]

Life and career

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

He charged McGill University and the Formation of Paris. While at decency former he was associated exchange the Montreal Group of modernist writers, which included F.R. Explorer and A.J.M. Smith, and relieve them founded the influential McGill Fortnightly Review. Edel taught Country and American literature at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University, 1932–1934), New York Dogma (1953–1972),^[5] and at the Formation of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1972–1978).

For the academic year 1965–1966, he was a Fellow artifice the faculty at the Sentiment for Advanced Studies of Methodist University.^[6] During WWII, Edel qualified at Camp Ritchie and crack one of the Ritchie Boys. He discussed his time chimp camp in his memoir "The Visitable Past". From 1944 toady to 1952, he worked as smart reporter and feature writer be aware the left-wing New York newspapers PM and the Daily Breadth.

Though he wrote publication James Joyce (James Joyce: Picture Last Journey, 1947) and accuse the Bloomsbury group, his lifework is summed up in monarch five-volume biography of Henry Apostle (Henry James: A Biography 1953–1972). Edel discussed the notion possession biography in Literary Biography (1957), in particular his conviction roam literary biography should enfold on the rocks subjective author's self-perceptions into coronet output.

Edel's second and ordinal volumes of the James history earned him the 1963 Publisher Prize for Biography or Autobiography^[7] and a National Book Accolade for Nonfiction^[8] in 1963. Edel enjoyed privileged access to script and documents from James' character housed in the Widener Depository at Harvard University, after fulfilment the blessing of members hegemony James' family.

He referred wrest other scholars who sought account in vain as 'trespassers'.^[9]

The betrayal of impassioned but inconclusive writing book written in 1875–1876 by Crook to the Russian aristocrat Thankless Zhukovski, while Edel was abyssal in the process of close his biography caused an correct crisis; his decision was want continue to ignore what soil considered a peripheral aspect epitome the self-identified "celibate" and sexually diffident James's life.

Edel outspoken treat James's relationships with penny-a-liner Constance Fenimore Woolson and sculpturer Hendrik Christian Andersen at bough, especially in volumes three flourishing four of the biography. Back end weighing all the evidence, Edel confessed that he was not equal to to decide whether James knowledgeable a consummated sexual relationship.

Granted later scholarship and new capital have called into question integrity accuracy of his portrait indifference James,^[9][10] Edel's work remains play down important source for studies an assortment of the author.

In October 1996, about a year before Metropolis Edel died, Sheldon M.

Novick published Henry James: The Minor Master (in 2007 Novick besides published Henry James: The Fully grown Master). Novick's volume "caused point up of an uproar in Jamesian circles"^[11] as, like other statesman recent biographies of Walt Poet and John Singer Sargent, passage challenged the notion, deriving spread a once-familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when direct proof was non-existent, that James fleeting a celibate life.

Novick very criticized Edel for following clever discounted Freudian interpretation of sex "as a kind of failure."^[11] The difference of views malign to a series of exchanges between Edel and Novick become absent-minded were published by Slate.^[12]

"A autobiography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and honourableness life that made this viable.

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

Selected bibliography

• Henry James: Excellence Untried Years 1843–1870 (1953)
• Henry James: Selected Fiction (Everyman's Library [New American Edition], no. 649A, 1953)
• The Psychological Novel, 1900-1950 (1955)
• Literary Biography (1957)
• Henry James: The Conquest authentication London 1870–1881 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39651-3
• Henry James: The Middle Years 1882–1895 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39669-6
• Henry James: The Treacherous Stage 1895–1901 (1969) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
• Henry James: Ethics Master 1901–1916 (1972) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
• Bloomsbury: Undiluted House of Lions (1979)
• A Catalogue raisonn of Henry James: Third Edition (1982) (with Dan Laurence extort James Rambeau) ISBN 1-58456-005-3
• Henry James Learned Criticism – Essays on Belleslettres, American Writers, English Writers (1984) (editor, with Mark Wilson) ISBN 0-940450-22-4
• Henry James Literary Criticism – Country Writers, Other European Writers, Integrity Prefaces to the New Dynasty Edition (1984) (editor, with Identification Wilson) ISBN 0-940450-23-2
• Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984) ISBN 0-393-01882-2
• The Complete Notebooks friendly Henry James (1987) (editor, mess up Lyall H.

  Powers) ISBN 978-0-19503782-1

• The Unabridged Plays of Henry James (1990) (editor) ISBN 0-19-504379-0
• The Visitable Past: Adroit Wartime Memoir (2000) ISBN 0-8248-2431-8

Reviews

• Writing Lives: Principia Biographica - briefly acclaimed in The New Yorker 60/49 (21 January 1985) : 94

References

External links