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Article: Ellmann and Wilde: Trans cendent art
- Article from:
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Article date:
- January 17, 1988
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright (null) Chicago Sun-Times. (Hide copyright information)
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Oscar Wilde By Richard Ellmann. Knopf. $24.95.
Oscar Wilde's life was a work of art, and so is this biography.
Wilde's work lasts; so will the late Richard Ellmann's. Ours is an
age of biography, ranging from the tedious and quotidian to landmarks
such as Ellmann's James Joyce, and now his Oscar Wilde. He is our
foremost literary biographer, and if Emerson was right and "there is
no history, only biography," then Ellmann is also one of our foremost
historians. (He was born in Michigan and died at Oxford in May, 1987.
A painful loss.)
Wilde is himself so grand, eloquent and witty a tragicomedy that
reputations have been made by memoirs about him and quotes from him,
but Ellmann ...