Leon Edel
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Joseph Leon Edel (9 September 1907 – 5 September 1997) was a North American literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he grew up in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. Edel attended McGill University and the Université de Paris. While at the former he co-founded the influential McGill Fortnightly Review. Edel taught English and American literature at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University, 1932–1934), New York University (1966–1972), and at University of Hawaii at Manoa (1972–1978). For the academic year 1965-1966, he was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University.
Though he wrote on James Joyce (James Joyce: The Last Journey, 1947) and on the Bloomsbury group, his lifework is summed up in his five-volume biography of Henry James (Henry James: A Biography 1953–1972), which epitomizes biography as a literary form, a subject he had discussed in Literary Biography (1957), and enfolds a subjective author's self-perceptions into his literary output. Edel's second and third volumes of the James biography earned him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1963. Edel enjoyed privileged access to letters and documents from James' life housed in the Widener Library at Harvard University, after gaining the blessing of members of James' family.
The discovery of impassioned but inconclusive letters written in 1875–1876 by James to the Russian aristocrat Paul Zhukovski, while Edel was deep in the process of finishing his biography caused an ethical crisis; his decision was to continue to ignore what he considered a peripheral aspect of the self-identified "celibate" and sexually diffident James's life. Edel did treat James's relationships with novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen at length, especially in volumes three and four of the biography. After weighing all the evidence, Edel confessed that he was unable to decide whether James experienced a consummated sexual relationship. Although later scholarship and new materials have called into question the accuracy of his portrait of James, Edel's work remains an important source for studies of the author.
- "A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip." — Leon Edel
Selected bibliography
- Henry James: The Untried Years 1843–1870 (1953)
- Literary Biography (1957)
- Henry James: The Conquest of London 1870–1881 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39651-3
- Henry James: The Middle Years 1882–1895 (1962) ISBN 0-380-39669-6
- Henry James: The Treacherous Years 1895–1901 (1969) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
- Henry James: The Master 1901–1916 (1972) ISBN 0-380-39677-7
- A Bibliography of Henry James: Third Edition (1982) (with Dan Laurence and James Rambeau) ISBN 1-58456-005-3
- Henry James Literary Criticism — Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (1984) (editor, with Mark Wilson) ISBN 0-940450-22-4
- Henry James Literary Criticism — French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (1984) (editor, with Mark Wilson) ISBN 0-940450-23-2
- Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984) ISBN 0393018822
- The Complete Plays of Henry James (1990) (editor) ISBN 0-19-504379-0
- The Visitable Past: A Wartime Memoir (2000) ISBN 0-8248-2431-8
Reviews
- Writing Lives: Principia Biographica - briefly noted in The New Yorker 60/49 (21 January 1985) : 94
