James Joyce

A groundbreaking innovator of literary technique and one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, short story writer and literary critic, best known for his 1922 novel Ulysses, a milestone of modernist fiction.

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Biography

Born in 1882 in Dublin, James Joyce began his education at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school known as ‘the Eton of Ireland,’ but his studies there were interrupted by the family’s financial problems pertaining to his father’s alcoholism. In 1899, Joyce enrolled at University College Dublin, where he read modern languages, Latin and logic. After meeting his life partner Nora Barnacle in 1904, they emigrated to Paris, later residing in Trieste, Rome and Zürich, never to return to Ireland to live.

Joyce’s first publication was the poetry collection Chamber Music (1907), followed by the story collection Dubliners (1914). His first novel, the autobiographical The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), traces the intellectual and emotional development of Stephen Dedalus, a man with artistic sensibilities and ambitions as he grapples with his Catholic heritage.

Joyce’s magnus opus Ulysses was first published in full in 1922 in Paris by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company, but its publication in Britain and the United States was delayed due to obscenity laws. An experimental, exhilarating account of a single day in Dublin, Ulysses is a landmark work in stream of consciousness technique and is generally considered as one of the pinnacles of modernist fiction. Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake (1939), is an innovative linguistic experiment that contains over forty languages, brimming with wordplay, allusions and aiming at multitude of meanings on every level.

Joyce died in 1941 in Zürich, following complications from a surgery.