Leon Edel was an American literary critic and biographer who won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1961 for his four-volume biography of Henry James. He was born in Philadelphia in 1907 and studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. He wrote numerous books on literary figures such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf. He was also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania. He died in 1997.