James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and short story writer. He published Portrait of the Artist in and caught the attention of Ezra Pound. With Ulysses , Joyce perfected his stream-of-consciousness style and became a literary celebrity. The explicit content of his prose brought about landmark legal decisions on obscenity. Joyce battled eye ailments for most of his life and he died in Born James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on February 2, , in Dublin, Ireland, Joyce was one of the most revered writers of the 20th century, whose landmark book, Ulysses , is often hailed as one of the finest novels ever written. His exploration of language and new literary forms showed not only his genius as a writer but spawned a fresh approach for novelists, one that drew heavily on Joyce's love of the stream-of-consciousness technique and the examination of big events through small happenings in everyday lives. Joyce came from a big family.
Early life
About Dubliners by James Joyce
Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th June , and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It has survived censorship, controversy and legal action, and even been deemed blasphemous, but remains an undisputed modernist classic: ceaselessly inventive, garrulous, funny, sorrowful, vulgar, lyrical and ultimately redemptive. It confirms Joyce's belief that literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Sold by: Amazon. James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, Ulysses , tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June , during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery. Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly-allusive novel, revolutionary in its Modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W. Yeats, T.
Quick Facts
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in West Rathgar, Dublin, in , one of the ten children of May and John Joyce and her husband John, a professional singer and later rate-collector from a bourgeois Catholic family. Joyce was temporarily home-schooled and spent a short while at a Christian Brothers school, before starting at Belvedere College, a Jesuit day school, run by his old Clongowes headmaster, Father John Conmee. Joyce attended University College Dublin in , where he studied modern languages, with Latin and logic. In he went to Paris with a view to studying medicine, but discovered, on arrival, that he did not have the necessary qualifications. He constantly struggled for money, relying on irregular work as a teacher, bank employee, cinema-owner and tweed-importer, and on patrons and supporters such as Harriet Shaw Weaver and Ezra Pound. He returned to Ireland in after his mother fell ill; she died in August On 16 June , he met Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom he spent the rest of his life. By autumn, Joyce was convinced of the impossibility of remaining in Ireland and persuaded Nora to travel with him; they arrived in Paris on 9 October Joyce would not return to Ireland to live.
His most famous work is Ulysses which follows the movements of Leopold Bloom through a single day on June 16th, After graduating from university, Joyce went to Paris, ostensibly to study medicine, and was recalled to Dublin in April because of the illness and subsequent death of his mother. He stayed in Ireland until , and in June that year he met Nora Barnacle, the Galway woman who was to become his partner and later his wife. After he left Ireland in , Joyce only made four return visits, the last of those in , after which he never returned to Ireland. His collection of short stories, Dubliners, on which he had been working since , was finally published, and he also wrote his only play, Exiles. It was after these successes that Joyce began to think seriously about writing the novel he had been formulating since Ulysses. With the start of World War One, Joyce and Nora, along with their two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were forced to leave Trieste and arrived in Zurich where they lived for the duration of the war.
