A Long the Riverrun

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In these 20 enjoyable lectures, articles, prefaces and reviews covering a span of 30 years, a great American literary biographer writes with insight, wisdom, humor and charm about the subjects of his major works Wilde, Yeats and Joyce as well as about Washington Irving, George Eliot, Henry James, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway, Frank O'Connor, Samuel Beckett and Henri Michaux. Additional contents include an essay on the Edwardians, a lecture on Freud and literary biography and a previously unpublished study of the background to Joyce's play Exiles , demonstrating that exile was a state to which Joyce was peculiarly suited. The collection will be of interest to general readers as well as to scholars and specialists. Mar.

Library Journal

Ellmann planned this selection of his literary and biographical essays before his death in May 1987. The modern literary gang's all here: Henry James, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Lawrence, Hemingway, and Beckett. Though many of the essays have appeared in earlier books--including Eminent Domain and Golden Codgers-- they all profit from the company they keep in this new assemblage. Ellmann's wide range, erudition, insightfulness, and stylistic grace are all on display. The book's title, taken from Finnegan's Wake, points to the valedictory nature of the book and reminds us how much Ellmann will be missed.-- Keith Cushman, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro