Ellmann was born in
Highland Park, Michigan, the second of three sons of James Isaac Ellman, a lawyer, and his wife Jeanette (née Barsook). His father was a
Romanian Jew and his mother was a
Ukrainian Jew from
Kyiv. Ellmann served in the
United States Navy and
Office of Strategic Services during
World War II. He studied at
Yale University, receiving his B.A. in 1939, his M.A. in 1941, and his PhD (for which he won the
John Addison Porter Prize) in 1947. In 1947, he was awarded a B.Litt. degree (an earlier form of the
M.Litt) by
Trinity College Dublin, where he was resident while researching his biography of Yeats. As a Yale undergraduate at
Jonathan Edwards College, Ellmann was a member of
Phi Beta Kappa (scholastic honor society); Chi Delta Theta (literary honor society); and, with
James Jesus Angleton, a member of the Executive Editorial Board of the
Yale Literary Magazine. He achieved "Scholar of the Second Rank" (current equivalent:
magna cum laude). The 1939
Yale Banner undergraduate yearbook published an untitled Ellmann account (similar in concept and style to Oscar Wilde's parables, which Ellmann cited in his 1987 biography
Oscar Wilde) of a chagrined Joseph, husband of Mary, and Jesus Christ's custodial father: Ellmann later returned to teach at Yale, and there he and Charles Feidelson Jr. edited the anthology
The Modern Tradition. He earlier taught at
Northwestern and the
University of Oxford before serving as
Emory University's
Robert W. Woodruff Professor from 1980 until his death. He was Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, 1970–1984, then
Professor Emeritus, a fellow at
New College, Oxford, 1970–1987, and an extraordinary fellow at
Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1984 until his death. He was also a
Fellow of the British Academy. In 1983 he delivered the British Academy's Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American Literature and History. Ellmann used his knowledge of the
Irish milieu to bring together four literary luminaries in
Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (1987), a collection of essays first delivered at the
Library of Congress. His wife, the former
Mary Donoghue, whom he married in 1949, was an essayist. The couple had three children: Stephen (b. 1951), a South Africa constitutional scholar, Maud (b. 1954), and
Lucy (b. 1956). The first two became academics and Lucy a novelist and writing teacher. Ellmann died of
motor neurone disease in
Oxford on May 13, 1987, at the age of 69. The
University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, acquired many of Ellmann's collected papers, artifacts, and ephemera. Other manuscripts are housed in the
Northwestern University's Library special collections department. ==Biographies==