On March 15th most people think of the Ides of March and Julius Caesar’s death. However, it is also the birthday of literary biographer Richard Ellmann. Ellmann is widely known in the literary community for his works on James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde, among others. The University of Tulsa’s Department of Special Collections and University Archives has one of the largest Ellmann collections in the world with over 350 boxes of his papers.
In commemoration of Ellman’s birthday, Garrison Keillor dedicated a portion of his Writer’s Almanac podcast to Richard Ellmann.