Richard David Ellmann, FBA (March 15, 1918 – May 13, 1987) was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats.

He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959),[1] one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century.

Ellmann was born in Highland Park, Michigan, the second of three sons of James Isaac Ellman, a lawyer, and his wife Jeanette (née Barsook).

[4] 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.

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: Joseph was no match for the angel and for Mary's flattering tears.

Meanwhile he would seek to forget his jealousy, despite the fact that the story sounded a bit fantastic to a reasonable man, which he guessed he was, and it would be well not to talk about it much outside.

[7] 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.

[8] The Irish novelist Edna O'Brien remarked that "H. G. Wells said that Finnegans Wake was an immense riddle, and people find it too difficult to read.

[14] Nevertheless, because Ellmann rushed to finish it before his death, he was unable to thoroughly revise it, and the book contains many factual errors, the most infamous of which is the claim that a photograph of the Hungarian diva Alice Guszalewicz depicts Wilde dressed as Salomé.

[15][16] Many of these errors are documented in Horst Schroeder’s book Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde.