James Joyce
1882–1941 12 entries
Biography
James Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, one of the great innovators of modern literature. Born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest surviving child of a large family that sank into poverty, he was educated by the Jesuits and at University College Dublin. In 1904 he left Ireland with Nora Barnacle, his lifelong companion, and from then on lived in Trieste, Zürich and Paris, teaching English and writing about the city he had left behind.
His stories Dubliners and the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were followed in 1922 by Ulysses, which follows Leopold Bloom through Dublin on a single day, 16 June 1904, in a bold mixture of styles and the stream of consciousness of its characters. Long banned in the United States and Britain as obscene, it is now often called the greatest novel in English, and 16 June is celebrated every year as Bloomsday. His last novel, Finnegans Wake, took him seventeen years. He died in Zürich in 1941 and is buried there.
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