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Yes I Will Read Ulysses Yes
How Richard Ellmann made James Joyce a hero to generations of readers and scholars
In fact, before Joyce ever published a book, he wrote newspaper articles and delivered lectures in Italian about Irish nationalism and his disdain for British imperialism in his native country, work that shed helpful light on his fiction. Thanks to the legendary GI Bill (which, after Ellmann’s stint in the Office of Strategic Services during the war, partially paid for his graduate work at Trinity College), undergraduate enrollment exploded, along with federal subsidies for university libraries under the National Defense Education Act. A writer like Joyce, whose works inspired exegetical devotion, was clearly at the forefront of likely 20th-century candidates for academic canonization, and the arrival of Ellmann’s biography as the 1950s ended helped spur his elevation to Saint James status in the postwar university.
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