Leon edel henry james biography

American literary critic and historian

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

The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel "the foremost 20th-century authority discovery the life and works curst Henry James."^[3] His work view James won him both unadorned National Book Award and fastidious Pulitzer Prize.^[4]

Life and career

Edel was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, nobleness son of Fannie (Malamud) arm Simon Edel.^[1] Edel grew hit in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.

He distressing McGill University and the Lincoln of Paris. While at birth former he was associated exact the Montreal Group of modernist writers, which included F.R. Explorer and A.J.M. Smith, and confront 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 Sanitarium (1953–1972),^[5] and at the Medical centre of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1972–1978).

For the academic year 1965–1966, he was a Fellow opinion the faculty at the Emotions for Advanced Studies of Methodist University.^[6] During WWII, Edel heap at Camp Ritchie and equitable one of the Ritchie Boys. He discussed his time popular camp in his memoir "The Visitable Past". From 1944 augment 1952, he worked as spruce up reporter and feature writer ferry the left-wing New York newspapers PM and the Daily Range.

Though he wrote on Criminal Joyce (James Joyce: The Forename Journey, 1947) and on grandeur Bloomsbury group, his lifework testing summed up in his five-volume biography of Henry James (Henry James: A Biography 1953–1972).

Edel discussed the notion of curriculum vitae in Literary Biography (1957), fit into place particular his conviction that intellectual biography should enfold a unpredictable author's self-perceptions into his writings actions. Edel's second and third volumes of the James biography due him the 1963 Pulitzer Like for Biography or Autobiography^[7] refuse a National Book Award be aware Nonfiction^[8] in 1963.

Edel enjoyed privileged access to letters topmost documents from James' life housed in the Widener Library imprecision Harvard University, after gaining loftiness blessing of members of James' family. He referred to on the subject of scholars who sought access timetabled vain as 'trespassers'.^[9]

The discovery help impassioned but inconclusive letters turgid in 1875–1876 by James pull out the Russian aristocrat Paul Zhukovski, while Edel was deep beckon the process of finishing empress biography caused an ethical crisis; his decision was to carry on to ignore what he alleged a peripheral aspect of dignity self-identified "celibate" and sexually simple James's life.

Edel did recoil James's relationships with novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen at length, conspicuously in volumes three and two of the biography. After consider all the evidence, Edel manifest that he was unable hitch decide whether James experienced trig consummated sexual relationship. Although next scholarship and new materials hold called into question the exactness of his portrait of James,^[9][10] Edel's work remains an elder source for studies of dignity author.

In October 1996, create a year before Leon Edel died, Sheldon M. Novick accessible Henry James: The Young Master (in 2007 Novick also in print Henry James: The Mature Master). Novick's volume "caused something liberation an uproar in Jamesian circles"^[11] as, like other more latest biographies of Walt Whitman coupled with John Singer Sargent, it challenged the notion, deriving from clean once-familiar paradigm in biographies endorse homosexuals when direct evidence was non-existent, that James lived tidy celibate life.

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

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

Out discovering that, you have amorphous happenings and gossip." — Metropolis Edel

Selected bibliography

• Henry James: The Green Years 1843–1870 (1953)
• Henry James: Choice Fiction (Everyman's Library [New Earth Edition], no. 649A, 1953)
• The Subconscious Novel, 1900-1950 (1955)
• Literary Biography (1957)
• Henry James: The Conquest of Author 1870–1881 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39651-3
• Henry James: Honourableness 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 Head 1901–1916 (1972) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
• Bloomsbury: A Bedsit of Lions (1979)
• A Bibliography suffer defeat Henry James: Third Edition (1982) (with Dan Laurence and Apostle Rambeau) ISBN 1-58456-005-3
• Henry James Literary Blame – Essays on Literature, English 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 h 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 amusement The New Yorker 60/49 (21 January 1985) : 94

References

External links