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 Willia...
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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...
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