Leon Edel facts for kids

Joseph Leon Edel (9 September 1907 – 5 September 1997) was an American/Canadian literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel.

The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel "the foremost 20th-century authority on the life and works of Henry James." His work on James won him both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Life and career

Cover of volume one of Leon Edel's five-volume biography of Henry James, Avon Books paperback edition 1978

Edel was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Fannie (Malamud) and Simon Edel. Edel grew up in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. He attended McGill University and the University of Paris. While at the former he was associated with the Montreal Group of modernist writers, which included F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith, and with them 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 (1953–1972), and at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1972–1978). For the academic year 1965–1966, he was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University. During WWII, Edel trained at Camp Ritchie and is one of the Ritchie Boys. He discussed his time at camp in his memoir "The Visitable Past". From 1944 to 1952, he worked as a reporter and feature writer for the left-wing New York newspapers PM and the Daily Compass.

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). Edel discussed the notion of biography in Literary Biography (1957), in particular his conviction that literary biography should enfold a subjective author's self-perceptions into his output. Edel's second and third volumes of the James biography earned him the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and a National Book Award for Nonfiction 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. He referred to other scholars who sought access in vain as 'trespassers'.

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.

Reviews

• Writing Lives: Principia Biographica - briefly noted in The New Yorker 60/49 (21 January 1985) : 94