Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.

He attended McGill University and the Université de Paris. J. "A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible.

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