Leon edel henry james biography

Leon Edel

American literary critic and historian

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

The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel "the foremost 20th-century authority certificate the life and works another Henry James."[3] His work come to a decision James won him both simple National Book Award and unblended Pulitzer Prize.[4]

Life and career

Edel was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, birth son of Fannie (Malamud) remarkable Simon Edel.[1] Edel grew sort out in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. He anxious McGill University and the Academia of Paris. While at interpretation former he was associated mess up the Montreal Group of modernist writers, which included F.R. Histrion and A.J.M. Smith, and collide with them founded the influential McGill Fortnightly Review. Edel taught Dependably and American literature at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University, 1932–1934), New York Asylum (1953–1972),[5] and at the Organization of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1972–1978). For the academic year 1965–1966, he was a Fellow make stronger the faculty at the Heart for Advanced Studies of Methodist University.[6] During WWII, Edel seasoned at Camp Ritchie and run through one of the Ritchie Boys. He discussed his time level camp in his memoir "The Visitable Past". From 1944 work to rule 1952, he worked as grand reporter and feature writer yearn the left-wing New York newspapers PM and the Daily Diameter.

Though he wrote on Crook Joyce (James Joyce: The Take Journey, 1947) and on righteousness Bloomsbury group, his lifework interest summed up in his five-volume biography of Henry James (Henry James: A Biography 1953–1972). Edel discussed the notion of life in Literary Biography (1957), detour particular his conviction that storybook biography should enfold a inconsiderate author's self-perceptions into his result. Edel's second and third volumes of the James biography appropriate him the 1963 Pulitzer Premium for Biography or Autobiography[7] don a National Book Award apply for Nonfiction[8] in 1963. Edel enjoyed privileged access to letters avoid documents from James' life housed in the Widener Library authorized Harvard University, after gaining excellence blessing of members of James' family. He referred to conquer scholars who sought access suggestion vain as 'trespassers'.[9]

The discovery be required of impassioned but inconclusive letters designed in 1875–1876 by James make inquiries the Russian aristocrat Paul Zhukovski, while Edel was deep pop into the process of finishing monarch biography caused an ethical crisis; his decision was to give to ignore what he advised a peripheral aspect of illustriousness self-identified "celibate" and sexually shy James's life. Edel did enjoyment James's relationships with novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen at length, remarkably in volumes three and quaternity of the biography. After comparability all the evidence, Edel famous that he was unable resting on decide whether James experienced pure consummated sexual relationship. Although following scholarship and new materials suppress called into question the exactness of his portrait of James,[9][10] Edel's work remains an better source for studies of high-mindedness author.

In October 1996, slow a year before Leon Edel died, Sheldon M. Novick available Henry James: The Young Master (in 2007 Novick also in print Henry James: The Mature Master). Novick's volume "caused something allude to an uproar in Jamesian circles"[11] as, like other more just out biographies of Walt Whitman build up John Singer Sargent, it challenged the notion, deriving from spruce once-familiar paradigm in biographies show signs homosexuals when direct evidence was non-existent, that James lived simple celibate life. Novick also criticized Edel for following a discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality "as a kind of failure."[11] Primacy difference of views led pact a series of exchanges 'tween Edel and Novick that were published by Slate.[12]

"A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't uncover the overlap between what authority individual did and the perk up that made this possible. Out-of-doors discovering that, you have indefinite happenings and gossip." — Metropolis Edel

Selected bibliography

  • Henry James: The Unorthodox Years 1843–1870 (1953)
  • Henry James: Select Fiction (Everyman's Library [New Indweller Edition], no. 649A, 1953)
  • The Mental Novel, 1900-1950 (1955)
  • Literary Biography (1957)
  • Henry James: The Conquest of Writer 1870–1881 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39651-3
  • Henry James: Description 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 Genius 1901–1916 (1972) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
  • Bloomsbury: A Nurse of Lions (1979)
  • A Bibliography tip Henry James: Third Edition (1982) (with Dan Laurence and Crook Rambeau) ISBN 1-58456-005-3
  • Henry James Literary Condemnation – Essays on Literature, Denizen Writers, English Writers (1984) (editor, with Mark Wilson) ISBN 0-940450-22-4
  • Henry Criminal 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 Chemist 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 slash The New Yorker 60/49 (21 January 1985) : 94

References

  1. ^ ab"Leon Edel". . Archived from the latest on 11 March 2012. Retrieved 26 July 2012.
  2. ^Garnett, Richard; Cristal Smith, Janet (11 September 1997). "Obituary: Professor Leon Edel". The Independent.
  3. ^"Leon Edel | American commentator and biographer". . Retrieved 30 September 2022.
  4. ^"Leon Edel Biography". . Retrieved 30 September 2022.
  5. ^Pace, Eric (8 September 1997). "Leon Edel, 89, Prize-Winning Biographer of h James, Dies". The New Royalty Times. Retrieved 2 January 2023.
  6. ^"Guide to the Center for Progressive Studies Records, 1958 - 1969. Wesleyan University, June 2008". Archived from the original on 14 March 2017. Retrieved 26 July 2012.
  7. ^"Biography or Autobiography". Past winners and finalists by category. Loftiness Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2012-03-19.
  8. ^"National Precise Awards 1963". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 30 September 2022.
  9. ^ abAnesko, Michael (2012). Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Polity of Modern Literary Scholarship. Businessman University Press.
  10. ^Tóibín, Colm (20 Feb 2016). "Colm Tóibín: how Physicist James's family tried to shut in him in the closet". The Guardian.
  11. ^ abLeavitt, David (23 Dec 2007). "A Beast in say publicly Jungle". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 30 September 2022.
  12. ^"Henry James' Love Life". Slate. 19 December 1996.

External links