A series of strokes had left him unable to write and, as a result, Mandel had receded from public view long before his death.
He was born Elias Wolf Mandel in Estevan, Saskatchewan, Canada to Russian Jewish parents who had emigrated from Ukraine, and grew up the Canadian prairies during the Great Depression.
[2] After a job working for a pharmacist who, landed him a position serving in Canada's Medical Corps during World War II,[3] it has been said Mandel returned a forever emotionally distraught man who was destined to live the rest of his life without a sense of belonging.
[7] Publishing poetry in the early 1950s,[8] Eli Mandel's first significant collection was entitled Minotaur poems (1954), and it appeared in the contact press anthology Trio (1954).
[8] Despite the lack of direct references to the war until Stony Plain (1973), his work illustrates many grim and morbid images of despair, destruction written with a tone of inescapable pessimism.
He was also a critic and editor, producing a monograph on his fellow-poet Irving Layton, and an anthology, Poetry62/Poésie62(1962), which he co-edited with Jean-Guy Pilon.
Eli Mandel's book, The Family Romance (1986), has been characterized by his quotations from essays on Hugh MacLennan and Northrop Frye’s The Great Code.