Anthony Burgess was so impressed with the biographer's work that he claimed it to be "the greatest
literary biography of the century."
Edna O'Brien, the Irish novelist, remarked that "
H. G. Wells said that
Finnegans Wake was an immense riddle, and people find it too difficult to read. I have yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of it—except perhaps my friend Richard Ellmann." Ellmann quotes extensively from
Finnegans Wake as
epigraphs in his biography of Joyce. In 2025
Harvard University Press published a biography of the biography, ''Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker by''
Zachary Leader. ==References==