james joyce biography

James Joyce

(1882-1941)

Who Was James Joyce?

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and short story writer. He published Portrait of the Artist in 1916 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 1941.

Early Life and Education

Born James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on February 2, 1882, 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. He was the eldest of ten children born to John Stanislaus Joyce and his wife Marry Murray Joyce. His father, while a talented singer (he reportedly had one of the finest tenor voices in all of Ireland), didn't provide a stable household. He liked to drink and his lack of attention to the family finances meant the Joyces never had much money.

From an early age, Joyce showed not only exceeding intelligence but also a gift for writing and a passion for literature. He taught himself Norwegian so he could read Henrik Ibsen's plays in the language they'd been written and spent his free time devouring Dante , Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas .

Because of his intelligence, Joyce's family pushed him to get an education. Largely educated by Jesuits, Joyce attended the Irish schools of Clongowes Wood College and later Belvedere College before finally landing at University College Dublin, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on modern languages.

Early Works: 'Dubliners' and 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

Joyce's relationship with his native country was a complex one and after graduating he left Ireland for a new life in Paris where he hoped to study medicine. He returned, however, not long after upon learning that his mother had become sick. She died in 1903.

Joyce stayed in Ireland for a short time, long enough to meet Nora Barnacle, a hotel chambermaid who hailed from Galway and later became his wife. Around this time, Joyce also had his first short story published in the Irish Homestead magazine. The publication picked up two more Joyce works, but this start of a literary career was not enough to keep him in Ireland and in late 1904, he and Barnacle moved first to what is now the Croatian city of Pula before settling in the Italian seaport city of Trieste.

There, Joyce taught English and learned Italian, one of 17 languages he could speak, a list that included Arabic, Sanskrit and Greek. Other moves followed as Joyce and Barnacle (the two weren't formally married until some three decades after they met) made their home in cities like Rome and Paris. To keep his family above water (the couple went on to have two children, Georgio and Lucia), Joyce continued to find work as a teacher.

All the while, though, Joyce continued to write and in 1914, he published his first book , Dubliners , a collection of 15 short stories. Two years later, Joyce put out a second book, the novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .

While not a huge commercial success, the book caught the attention of the American poet, Ezra Pound, who praised Joyce for his unconventional style and voice.

'Ulysses' and Controversy

The same year that the Dubliners came out, Joyce embarked on what would prove to be his landmark novel: Ulysses . The story recounts a single day in Dublin. The date: June 16, 1904, the same day that Joyce and Barnacle met. On the surface, the novel follows the story three central characters: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly Bloom, as well as the city life that unfolds around them. But Ulysses is also a modern retelling of Homer 's Odyssey , with the three main characters serving as modern versions of Telemachus, Ulysses and Penelope.

With its advanced use of interior monologue, the novel not only brought the reader deep into Bloom's sometimes lurid mind but pioneered Joyce's use of stream of consciousnesses as a literary technique and set the course for a whole new kind of novel. But Ulysses is not an easy read, and upon its publication in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, an American expat who owned a bookstore in the city, the book drew both praise and sharp criticism.

All of which only helped bolster the novel's sales. Not that it really needed the help. Long before Ulysses ever came out, debate raged over the content of the novel. Parts of the story had appeared in publications in the United States and the United Kingdom, the book was banned for several years after it was published in France. In the United States, Ulysses 's supposed obscenity prompted the Post Office to confiscate issues of the magazine that had published Joyce's work. Fines were levied against the editors, and a censorship battle was waged that only further hyped the novel.

Still, the book found its way into the hands of eager American and British readers, who managed to get hold of bootlegged copies of the novel. In the United States, the ban came to a head in 1932 when in New York City Customs Agents seized copies of the book that had been sent to Random House, which wanted to publish the book.

The case made its way to court where, in 1934, Judge John M. Woolsey came down in favor of the publishing company by declaring that Ulysses was not pornographic. American readers were free to read the book. In 1936, British fans of Joyce were allowed to do the same.

While he sometimes resented the attention Ulysses brought him, Joyce saw his days as a struggling writer come to an end with the book's publication. It hadn't been an easy road. During World War I, Joyce had moved his family to Zurich, where they subsisted on the generosity of English magazine editor, Harriet Weaver, and Barnacle's uncle.

Later Career and 'Finnegans Wake'

Eventually, Joyce and his family settled into a new life in Paris, which is where they were living when Ulysses was published. Success, however, couldn't protect Joyce from health issues. His most problematic condition concerned his eyes. He suffered from a constant stream of ocular illnesses, went through a host of surgeries, and for a number of years was near blind. At times, Joyce was forced to write in red crayon on sheets of large paper.

In 1939, Joyce published Finnegans Wake , his long-awaited follow-up novel, which, with its myriad of puns and new words, proved to be an even more difficult read than his previous work. Still, the book was an immediate success, earning "book of the week" honors in the United States and the United Kingdom not long after debuting.

A year after Finnegan s' publication, Joyce and his family were on the move again, this time to southern France in advance of the coming Nazi invasion of Paris. Eventually, the family ended back in Zurich.

Sadly, Joyce never saw the conclusion of World War II. Following an intestinal operation, the writer died at the age of 59 on January 13, 1941, at the Schwesternhause von Roten Kreuz Hospital. His wife and son were at his bedside when he passed. He is buried in Fluntern cemetery in Zurich.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: James
• Birth Year: 1882
• Birth date: February 2, 1882
• Birth City: Dublin
• Birth Country: Ireland
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: James Joyce was an Irish, modernist writer who wrote in a ground-breaking style that was known both for its complexity and explicit content.
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• University College Dublin
• Belvedere College
• Clongowes Wood College
• Nacionalities
• Death Year: 1941
• Death date: January 13, 1941
• Death City: Zurich
• Death Country: Switzerland

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: James Joyce Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
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• Last Updated: March 31, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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James Joyce (February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941) was an Irish novelist who is widely considered to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. His novel Ulysses was controversial when published in 1922 and was banned in many locations, yet it has become one of the most discussed and studied books over the past century.

Born in Dublin, Joyce grew up in Ireland and is considered the quintessential Irish writer, yet he often rejected his homeland. He spent most of his adult life living on the European continent, obsessing over Ireland while creating in Ulysses a portrait of Irish life as experienced by Dublin's residents during one particular day, June 16, 1904.

Fast Facts: James Joyce

• Full Name: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
• Known For: Innovative and highly influential Irish writer. Author of novels, short stories, and poetry
• Born: February 2, 1882 in Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland
• Parents: John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray
• Died: January 13, 1941 in Zurich, Switzerland
• Education: University College Dublin
• Movement: Modernism
• Selected Works: Dubliners , A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Ulysses , Finnegans Wake .
• Spouse: Nora Barnacle Joyce
• Children: son Giorgio and daughter Lucia
• Notable Quote: "When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove." (Lecture Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages )

James Joyce was born February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a Dublin suburb. His parents, John and Mary Jane Murray Joyce, were both musically talented, a trait which was passed along to their son. The family was large, with James the oldest of ten children who survived childhood.

The Joyces were part of an emerging Irish nationalist middle class of the late 1800s, Catholics who identified with the politics of Charles Stewart Parnell and expected the eventual home rule of Ireland. Joyce's father had a job as a tax collector, and the family was secure until the early 1890s, when his father lost his job, possibly because of a drinking problem. The family began to slide into financial insecurity.

As a child, Joyce was educated by Irish Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College in Kildare, Ireland, and later at Belvedere College in Dublin (through some family connections he was able to attend at reduced tuition). He eventually attended University College Dublin, focusing on philosophy and languages. Following his graduation in 1902 he traveled to Paris, intent on pursuing medical studies.

Joyce found he could not afford the fees for the schooling he sought, but he stayed in Paris and subsisted on money earned teaching English, writing articles, and with money occasionally sent to him by relatives back in Ireland. After a few months in Paris, he received an urgent telegram in May 1903 calling him back to Dublin as his mother was ill and dying.

Joyce had rejected Catholicism, but his mother asked him to go to confession and take Holy Communion. He refused. After she slipped into a coma, his mother's brother asked Joyce and his brother Stanislaus to kneel and pray at her bedside. They both refused. Joyce later used the facts surrounding his mother's death in his fiction. The character Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man refused his dying mother's wish and feels tremendous guilt for it.

Meeting Nora Barnacle

Joyce remained in Dublin following his mother's death and managed to make a modest living teaching and writing book reviews. The most important meeting of Joyce's life occurred when he saw a young woman with reddish-brown hair on the street in Dublin. She was Nora Barnacle, a native of Galway, in the west of Ireland, who was working in Dublin as a hotel maid. Joyce was struck by her and asked her for a date.

Joyce and Nora Barnacle agreed to meet in a few days and walk about the city. They fell in love, and would go on to live together and eventually marry.

Their first date occurred on June 16, 1904, the same day during which the action in Ulysses takes place. By selecting that particular date as the setting of his novel, Joyce was memorializing what he considered a momentous day in his life. As a practical matter, as that day stood out so clearly in his mind, he could remember specific details while writing Ulysses more than a decade later.

Early Publications

• Chamber Music (collection of poems, 1907)
• Giacomo Joyce (collection of poems, 1907)
• Dubliners (collection of short stories, 1914)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (novel, 1916)
• Exiles (play, 1918)

Joyce was determined to leave Ireland, and on October 8, 1904, he and Nora left together to live on the European continent. They would remain fiercely devoted to each other, and in some ways Nora was Joyce's great artistic muse. They would not legally marry until 1931. Living together outside of marriage would have been an enormous scandal in Ireland. In Trieste, Italy, where they eventually settled, no one seemed to care.

In the summer of 1904, while still living in Dublin, Joyce began publishing a series of short stories in a newspaper, the Irish Homestead. The stories would eventually grow into a collection titled Dubliners . On their first publication, readers wrote to the newspaper to complain about the puzzling stories, but today Dubliners is considered an influential collection of short fiction.

In Trieste, Joyce rewrote a piece of autobiographical fiction he had first attempted back in Dublin. But he also worked on a volume of poetry. His first published book was thus his poetry collection, Chamber Music , which was published in 1907.

It ultimately took Joyce ten years to get his short story collection into print. Joyce's realistic portrayal of city dwellers was considered immoral by a number of publishers and printers. Dubliners finally appeared in 1914.

Joyce's experimental fiction proceeded with his next work, an autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . The book follows the development of Stephen Dedalus, a character much like Joyce himself, a sensitive and artistically inclined young man determined to rebel against society's strictures. The book was published in 1916, and was reviewed widely by literary publications. Critics seemed impressed by the author's obvious skill, but were often offended or simply puzzled by his portrayal of life in Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1918 Joyce wrote a play, Exiles . The plot concerns an Irish writer and his wife who have lived in Europe and return to Ireland. The husband, as he believes in spiritual freedom, encourages a romantic relationship between his wife and his best friend (which is never consummated). The play is considered a minor work of Joyce's, but some of the ideas in it appeared later in Ulysses .

Ulysses and Controversy

• Ulysses (novel, 1922)
• Pomes Penyeach (collection of poems, 1927)

As Joyce was struggling to publish his earlier work, he began an undertaking that would make his reputation as a literary giant. The novel Ulysses , which he began writing in 1914, is loosely based on the epic poem by Homer , The Odyssey . In the Greek classic, the protagonist Odysseus is a king and a great hero who is wandering homeward following the Trojan War. In Ulysses (the Latin name for Odysseus), a Dublin advertising salesman named Leopold Bloom, spends a typical day traveling about the city. Other characters in the book include Bloom's wife, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictitious alter ego who had been the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .

Ulysses is structured in 18 untitled chapters, each of which correspond to particular episodes of The Odyssey . Part of the innovation of Ulysses is that each chapter (or episode) is written in a different style (as the chapters were not only unmarked but unnamed, the change in presentation is what would alert the reader that a new chapter had begun).

It would be difficult to overstate the complexity of Ulysses , or the amount of detail and care that Joyce put into it. Ulysses has become known for Joyce's use of stream of consciousness and interior monologues. The novel is also remarkable for Joyce's use of music throughout and for his sense of humor, as wordplay and parody are employed throughout the text.

On Joyce's 40th birthday, February 2, 1922, Ulysses was published in Paris (some excerpts had been published earlier in literary journals). The book was immediately controversial, with some writers and critics, including novelist Ernest Hemingway , declaring it a masterpiece. But the book was also considered obscene and was banned in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States. After a court battle, the book was finally ruled by an American judge to be a work of literary merit and not obscene, and it was legally published in America in 1934.

Ulysses remained controversial, even after it was ruled to be legal. Critics battled over its worth, and while it is considered to be a classic work, it has had detractors who found it baffling. In recent decades the book has become controversial because of battles over which particular edition constitute the genuine book. As Joyce made so many changes to his manuscript, and it is believed printers (some of whom could not understand English) made mistaken changes, various versions of the novel exist. A version published in the 1980s sought to correct many mistakes, but some Joyce scholars objected to the "corrected" edition, claiming it injected more mistakes and was itself a faulty edition.

Joyce and Nora, their son Giorgio, and daughter Lucia had moved to Paris while he was writing Ulysses . After the book's publication they remained in Paris. Joyce was respected by other writers and at times would socialize with people like Hemingway or Ezra Pound. But he mostly devoted himself to a new written work which consumed the rest of his life.

Finnegans Wake

• Collected Poems (collection of previously published poems and works, 1936)
• Finnegans Wake (novel, 1939)

Joyce's final book, Finnegans Wake , published in 1939, is puzzling, and it was no doubt intended to be. The book seems to be written in several languages at once, and the bizarre prose on the page seems to represent a dream-like state. It has often been noted that if Ulysses was the story of a day, Finnegans Wake is the story of a night.

The title of the book is based on an Irish-American vaudeville song in which an Irish worker, Tim Finnegan, dies in an accident. At his wake, liquor is spilled on his corpse and he rises from the dead. Joyce deliberately removed the apostrophe from the title, as he intended a pun. In Joyce's joke, the mythical Irish hero Finn MacCool is waking, therefore Finn again wakes . Such wordplay and complicated allusions are rampant through more than 600 pages of the book.

As might be expected, Finnegans Wake is Joyce's least-read book. Yet it has its defenders, and literary scholars have debated its merits for decades.

Literary Style and Themes

Joyce's writing style evolved over time, and each of his major works can be said to have its own distinct style. But, in general, his writings are marked with a remarkable attention to language, an innovative use of symbolism, and the use of interior monologue to portray the thoughts and feelings of a character.

Joyce's work is also defined by its complexity. Joyce exercised great care in his writing, and readers and critics have noticed layers and layers of meaning in his prose. In his fiction, Joyce made references to a wide variety of subjects, from classical literature to modern psychology. And his experiments with language involved the use of formal elegant prose, Dublin slang, and, especially in Finnegans Wake , the use of foreign terms, often as elaborate puns holding multiple meanings.

Death and Legacy

Joyce had been suffering from various health problems for many years by the time of the publication of Finnegans Wake . He had undergone many surgeries for eye problems, and was nearly blind.

When World War II broke out, the Joyce family fled from France to neutral Switzerland to escape the Nazis. Joyce died in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13, 1941, after surgery for a stomach ulcer.

It is virtually impossible to overstate the importance of James Joyce on modern literature. Joyce's new methods of composition had a profound impact, and writers who followed him were often influenced and inspired by his work. Another great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett , considered Joyce an influence, as did the American novelist William Faulkner.

In 2014, the New York Times Book Review published an article headlined "Who Are James Joyce's Modern Heirs?" In the opening of the article, a writer notes, "Joyce’s work is so canonical that in some sense we are all inescapably his heirs." It is true that many critics have noted nearly all serious writers of fiction in the modern era have, directly or indirectly, been influenced by Joyce's work.

Stories from Dubliners have often been collected in anthologies, and Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , has often been used in high school and college classes.

Ulysses changed what a novel could be, and literary scholars continue to obsess over it. The book is also widely read and loved by ordinary readers, and every year on June 16th, "Bloomsday" celebrations (named for the main character, Leopold Bloom) are held in locations around the globe, including Dublin (of course), New York, and even Shanghai, China .

• "Joyce, James." Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature, vol. 2, Gale, 2009, pp. 859-863.
• "James Joyce." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed., vol. 8, Gale, 2004, pp. 365-367.
• Dempsey, Peter. "Joyce, James (1882—1941)." British Writers, Retrospective Supplement 3, edited by Jay Parini, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2010, pp. 165-180.
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James Joyce Biography

Birthday: February 2 , 1882 ( Aquarius )

Born In: Rathgar, Ireland

James Joyce was one of the most influential writers in the early part of the 20th century. This Irish poet, short story writer, novelist and playwright is known for his modernist avant-garde style of writing that focused on literary innovation, narrative and indirect style. In his seminal work, ‘Ulysses', he perfected the literary technique of ‘stream of consciousness', which refers to the thought process of the narrator. He was also known for the experimental use of language and made many technical discoveries in the art of novel writing, like the use of interior monologue. Some of his well-known works include, ‘Finnegans Wake’, 'Dubliners', 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and 'Pomes Penyeach'. Apart from this, he also authored three books of poetry, gained some experience in journalism and authored a play. As a young boy, he loved to read and developed a passion for writing and literature. While his writing is based on Dublin, his fictional characters resemble people he knew in real life. The explicit content in his writings resulted in landmark decisions on obscenity.

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Also Known As: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce

Died At Age: 58

Spouse/Ex-: Nora

father: John Stanislaus Joyce

mother: Mary Jane

siblings: Stanislaus Joyce

children: Lucia

Born Country: Ireland

Novelists Short Story Writers

Died on: January 13 , 1941

place of death: Zürich, Switzerland

Cause of Death: Perforated Ulcer

Diseases & Disabilities: Cynophobia, Astraphobia

education: University College Dublin

You wanted to know

What is james joyce known for, what are some of james joyce's most famous works, how did james joyce's writing style influence literature, where did james joyce live and work for a significant part of his life, what themes are commonly explored in james joyce's works.

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James Joyce was known to have a great love for animals, especially cats. He often had cats as pets throughout his life and even included them in his writing.

Despite his reputation as a serious and intellectual writer, Joyce had a playful side and enjoyed wordplay and puns. He often included humor and wit in his works.

Joyce had a strong connection to his Irish heritage and drew inspiration from Irish history, culture, and politics in his writing.

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James Joyce – Biography | Quotes

James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882, in Rathgar, Dublin. His parents were middle-class Catholics and his father was employed as a rent collector. Joyce grew up in a time when there were strong calls for Irish home rule and a new sense of national identity was being created. He appeared to be politically aware from a young age. Aged only nine years old he wrote a poem about the Irish republican leader Charles Stewart Parnell. His father was delighted his young son and praised Parnell because, like many Irishmen, his father was unhappy at Parnell’s treatment by the British and Catholic Church and the refusal to grant home rule.

Joyce aged 6

Despite being one of ten children, James Joyce was sent to a prestigious Jesuit boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. However, although receiving good income, his father was disorganised and dissolute – frittering away money on alcohol. Joyce was removed from that school and began to study at home with his mother. However, he later received a scholarship to the Jesuit, Belvedere College. Joyce did well academically and was twice elected to be president of the Marian Society. However, Joyce was a free thinker and spent his time reading books not approved of by the Jesuits; increasingly he became sceptical of the Catholic Church and the Irish establishment. He still retained an interest in religion and was strongly influenced by rationalist Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas.

In 1898, Joyce entered University College Dublin to study English, French and Italian. He also learnt Norwegian to be able to read Henrik Ibsen’s works in their original language. Despite mixing with the leading cultural and political figures of the day, Joyce felt Ireland suffered from too much social conformity and he hoped that moving to Europe would broaden his horizons. In 1902, he left for Paris with an intention to study medicine. However, in Paris, he struggled both with the study of medicine and financially. He soon dropped the idea of becoming a doctor, and when his mother fell fatally ill, he rushed back to Dublin to pay his last respects. But, much to his mother’s disappointment, he wouldn’t take the Catholic rites of confession and Holy communion – indicating outwardly he had left his Catholic faith. However, he later regretted not kneeling in prayer for his mother and denying her one of her last wishes.

Back in Ireland, he gained work teaching, singing and reviewing books. But, it was a precarious existence, with limited income stretched by his fondness for drinking copious amounts of alcohol. In 1904, he met Nora Barnacle a young chambermaid and they became romantically involved. Joyce then took Nora to Zurich, Trieste and finally Pola (then part of Austria-Hungary Empire modern-day Croatia), where he found work as a teacher. In Pola, his partner Nora gave birth to their first child, and they were joined by Joyce’s brother. They had a daughter Lucia in 1907. Joyce’s personal life was somewhat turbulent. His heavy drinking created friction with Nora and his brother.

In between teaching Joyce worked on writing short stories. These included a collection of stories related to his own experiences growing up in Dublin.

“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” conversation with Frank Budgen, Zurich, 1918

On a couple of occasions, he returned to Dublin to try and get his collection of short stories “The Dubliners” published. But he struggled to convince his publisher to make it available. It was finally published in 1914 by the London publishing house of Grant Richards – nine years after he had completed it and after 17 rejections. The book considered themes of Irish nationalism and identity and was critical of the conservatism he felt Dublin represented at the time.

During the First World War, many of his students were conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian empire, but Joyce was given an exit visa for Switzerland and he spent the war in Zurich. After the war, Joyce’s reputation as an innovative writer led to rich benefactors supporting him with grants to focus on writing. Joyce was very pleased and took the opportunity – moving to Paris and working very hard on finishing his first novel he started back in 1914.

“There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present. There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.”

When the book came out, it was praised for its depth of characterisation and insight into the human character. The book was also controversial when released, it was criticised for ‘obscene’ passages where characters mused on images of a sexual nature. It was temporarily banned in US and UK. (It was not published in US until 1934) Copies were destroyed by customs authorities. However, the partial ban only served to act as a means for improving awareness of the book. With good reviews from people like Ezra Pound, it gained good sales. Joyce’s innovative techniques, such as humour, parody and a stream of consciousness thought became a key element of modernist literature.

After Ulysses, Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write for a year. But, when he felt recovered he started work on a second novel, which he called “A work in Progress” – later published as “Finnegan’s Wake”. This took the stream of consciousness of Ulysees and pushed it to the limit, so much that the plot was obscure and language sometimes hard to decipher. When it came out, reviews were mixed with some reviewers feeling Joyce had tried too hard to be innovative and contrarian. Joyce was hard hit by the negative reviews and organised a supportive list of authors, such as Williams Carlos Williams who wrote positive comments.

Joyce suffered from poor health, through much of his life. In particular, his eyesight deteriorated and despite frequent eye surgery struggled to stem his loss of eyesight. He had over 30 eye operations in the 1920s and ended up wearing an eye patch. His daughter Lucia also suffered from schizophrenia and he was increasingly worried about her mental health. He took her to see Carl Jung, the famous psychologist. Jung remarked that he felt both Joyce and his daughter were schizophrenics, but Joyce was OK, because of his genius, he remarked they were

“like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.”

Jung said he could not treat Lucia and she was committed to a mental asylum. In 1940, Joyce was in Paris, when the imminent Nazi invasion forced him to flee to the south of France. He then made his way to Zurich, Switzerland. He passed away on 13 January 1941, after falling sick from a tumour. He was 58 years old. His last words were reported as: “Does nobody understand?”

Political views

In the 1900s, Joyce became interested in democratic socialism. He supported the broad ideals of a more egalitarian society and a chance to change the rigid orthodoxies of the establishment. His political activism was short-lived as he became disillusioned with the infighting of the socialist parties and movements. But, he remained sympathetic to socialist ideals.

Irish identity

Despite not living in Ireland for much of his adult life, he felt a close kinship to the country of his birth. His novels and writings focus on the settings of Ireland and Dublin in particular. He said that through writing about his home city of Dublin, he could touch on universal themes.

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

Was Joyce an Irish nationalist?

Joyce did express support for Home Rule and the aspirations of Parnell. He was not an unwavering supporter because he felt Ireland was ruled by the Catholic Church. He once said

“I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.”

Also, Joyce was critical at what he saw as the narrow-mindedness and zealotry of some nationalists.

His biographer Richard Ellmann suggests he had an initial enthusiasm for the 1916 Easter rising, but it soon wore off and he rejected an opportunity to write an article on the uprising. When asked whether he looked forward to the Irish Republic, he rather ironically replied “Why? So that I might declare myself its first enemy?'” ( 1 ) – The censorship of his Dublin based stories rankled with Joyce throughout his life. In Ulysees, he touches on violent upheaval and Joyce’s distaste for war and conflict are evident.

“—But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life. —What? says Alf. —Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.” (Ulysees)

Joyce both loved Dublin and Ireland but felt a need to escape and write about Dublin from a geographical distance. Explaining his decision to live away from Ireland, he explains how the country held back a man’s development.

“The economic and intellectual conditions of his homeland do not permit the individual to develop. The spirit of the country has been weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties. Individual initiative has been paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while the body has been shackled by peelers, duty officers and soldiers. No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland.” “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” lecture, (27 April 1907

He never set foot in Ireland after 1912. Spending time in Paris, he became acquainted with many of the leading European intellectuals such as Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway , Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot. He loved their company, but intriguingly if he met an Irish ex-pat, he would invite them to talk about the streets of Dublin to reminisce about his old town.

Religious views

The religious views of Joyce have gained considerable interest. The role of the Catholic Church in Ireland was very powerful during Joyce’s childhood and lifetime. He rejected formal membership of the church arguing that it went against his instinctive ideals. He wrote to his partner Nora Barnacle

” My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity—home, the recognised virtues, classes of life and religious doctrines. … Six years ago I left the Catholic church, hating it most fervently. I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature. I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me. By doing this I made myself a beggar but I retained my pride. Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do.” – Letter 1904. Selected Letters of James Joyce.

Yet, despite this, Joyce attended Church services later in his life – even though he stated it was more for aesthetic reasons than religious ones. Joyce held a mixture of mutually inconsistent views and reviewers see Catholic themes embedded in his writings. In “A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man” Joyce explains his own intellectual development and explains an ‘epiphany’ where he realised you could experience life through art and not just religion. He also retained a great faith in the human soul and a spiritual view of the world.

“All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.” Letter to Augusta Gregory (22 November 1902),

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of James Joyce ”, Oxford, UK www.biographyonline.net , Published 4 April 2020.

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James joyce: a biography.

James Augustine Joyce, the eldest surviving son of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane ('May') Joyce, was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882. He attended Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boys' school in County Kildare, until his father lost his job as a Rates Collector in 1891. Around the same time, Joyce took 'Aloysius' as his confirmation name. After a brief spell at the Christian Brothers School, all of the Joyce brothers entered Belvedere College, a Jesuit boys' day school; fortunately, the school fees were waived.

In 1894, with the Joyces' finances dwindling further, the family moved house for the fourth time since Joyce's birth. They also sold off their last remaining Cork property. Despite increasing poverty and upheaval, Joyce managed to win a prize for his excellent exam results and wrote an essay on Ulysses which, arguably, sowed the seeds for Joyce's 1922 masterpiece of the same name. In 1896 Joyce was made prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a devotional society. However, he was not as pure as he seemed; Joyce claimed to have begun his ‘sexual life’ later that year, at the age of fourteen.[1]

In 1898, Joyce began studying modern languages at the Royal University (now University College, Dublin). During his time at university Joyce published several papers on literature, history, and politics. He also enjoyed visits to the music hall.[2] Joyce became particularly interested in the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and Irish writer W. B. Yeats. In 1902, on a visit to London, Joyce met Yeats who introduced him to the British poet and critic Arthur Symons. In the same year, Joyce registered to study medicine at the Royal University but decided to leave Dublin and start medical school in Paris instead. Joyce's Parisian days were largely spent reading philosophy or literature, rather than learning about medicine. Whilst back in Dublin for Christmas, Joyce met Oliver St John Gogarty, a fellow medical student and poet who was to be reimagined as Buck Mulligan in Ulysses (1922). Joyce returned to Paris in January but soon gave up his course. In 1903, Joyce came back to Dublin to be with his ailing mother who died on 13 August.

Early Works and Family

1904 was a significant year for Joyce. He began work on his short story collection Dubliners (1914) and Stephen Hero (a semi-biographical novel), wrote his first poetry collection Chamber Music (1907) , and wrote an essay entitled 'A Portrait of the Artist' which would later be transformed into a novel entitled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Shortly after leaving the family home, Joyce met Nora Barnacle, a charming chambermaid hailing from Galway. Joyce and Nora first went out together on 16 June 1904, the date on which Ulysses is set. Four months later, the couple left Dublin for continental Europe. They arrived in Zurich but soon moved to Pola as Joyce secured a job teaching English with the Berlitz School.

In 1905, Joyce transferred to the Berlitz School in Trieste. Except for six months in Rome, attempting to become a banker, Joyce stayed in Trieste for the next eleven years. On 27 July 1905, Joyce's son, Giorgio, was born. He was followed by Joyce's daughter, Lucia, who was born on 26 July 1907. Around the time of Lucia's birth, Joyce was hospitalised with rheumatic fever and began to experience the eye troubles which would plague him throughout his life. Despite his below-par health and lack of money, Joyce managed to avail himself of Trieste's cultural delights; drinking, dining, more drinking, theatre, popular opera, dances, concerts, and films. He also took singing lessons; Joyce's teacher, Francesco Ricardo Sinico, 'praised his voice but told him he would need two years to train it properly'.[3] Unfortunately, Joyce did not have the funds to continue with his lessons for the suggested length of time. Nonetheless, Joyce's singing teacher clearly made an impression on him as he used his name for Captain and Emily Sinico in his Dubliners story 'A Painful Case'.

In 1909, Joyce befriended Ettore Schmitz (Italian author 'Italo Svevo') who praised Joyce's unfinished manuscripts for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and persuaded him to finish the novel. Whilst back in Dublin for talks with publishers, Joyce bumped into an old acquaintance, Vincent Cosgrave, who claimed that Nora had enjoyed relations with him whilst committed to Joyce. Joyce's conflicted emotions regarding this claim can be traced in his letters to Nora.[4] Joyce eventually reconciled his differences with Nora and returned to Trieste in October 1909. In December of the same year, Joyce went back to Dublin to open one of the city's first permanent cinemas – The Volta . This was a short-lived business venture; the cinema closed down in April 1910.[5]

Struggle and Success

From 1910 to 1913, Joyce was mainly engaged in revising A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and battling to get Dubliners published. To earn money, Joyce lectured at the Università; his series of Hamlet lectures could well have been an inspiration for Stephen's Hamlet theory in the 'Scylla and Charybdis' episode of Ulysses . In 1914, thanks to the enthusiasm of fellow Modernist Ezra Pound, Dubliners was serialised in the Egoist , a literary journal. Later that year, Dubliners was finally published as a novel by Grant Richards. Whilst other young men were going off to fight in the First World War, Joyce began a prolific writing period; in the final months of 1914, Joyce wrote Giacomo Joyce (a semi-autobiographical multilingual novelette which Joyce never attempted to publish), drafted Exiles (Joyce's only play), and began writing Ulysses (Joyce's famous modern epic).[6]

In 1915, Joyce, Nora, Giorgio, and Lucia, left Trieste for neutral Zurich. Stanislaus, Joyce's brother who had also been living in Trieste, failed to escape; he was placed in an Austrian detention centre until the end of the war. For the next few years, aided by grants from the Royal Literary Fund and the British Civil List (secured by Yeats and Pound), Joyce continued to write steadily. Joyce finished Exiles in May 1915 and, despite undergoing his first eye operation in August 1917, Ulysses continued to progress.

Controversy and Final Works

In 1918, Exiles was published by Grant Richards, and in 1919 it was performed in Munich. From March 1918 to September 1920, Ulysses (still unfinished) was serialised in the Little Review , another literary magazine. However, not many subscribers were able to read certain episodes ('Laestrygonians', 'Scylla and Charybdis', 'Cyclops', and 'Nausicaa') as the magazines were confiscated and burned by the US Postal Authorities. The Egoist successfully published and distributed edited (less obscene) versions of several Ulysses episodes. In 1921, the Little Review was convicted of publishing obscenities and ceased publication. Joyce, now living in Paris (the whole family moved in October 1920), befriended Sylvia Beach who offered to publish Ulysses – in its entirety – under the imprint of her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Joyce agreed to Beach's offer; after many revisions before and during the proof stages, the first copies of Ulysses were published on Joyce's fortieth birthday – 2/2/1922.[7]

In 1923, Joyce began writing Work in Progress which would later become his experimental masterpiece, Finnegans Wake (1939). The following year, the first fragments of Work in Progress were published in Transatlantic Review , with further instalments being published in transition in 1927. 1927 also saw the publication of Joyce's second poetry collection, Pomes Penyeach , published by Shakespeare and Company. In 1928 Anna Livia Plurabelle (an early, shorter version of Finnegans Wake ) was published in New York. Joyce was also recorded reading Anna Livia Plurabelle aloud; he played this recording to the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein when they met the following year.[8]

1929 and 1931 saw French translations of Ulysses and Anna Livia Plurabelle respectively. In 1930, despite undergoing a series of further eye operations, Joyce finished and published Haveth Childers Everywhere , a sequel to Anna Livia Plurabelle and another step towards Finnegans Wake . On 4 July 1931, Joyce and Nora were officially married, in London. In December of the same year, Joyce's father passed away. In 1932 (15 February), Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, was born to Giorgio and his wife Helen. Meanwhile, Lucia's mental health deteriorated; she was seen by a clinic in 1932, hospitalised in 1933, and treated by analytical psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1934.

In 1933, Ulysses faced an obscenity trial in America. After deliberation, Judge John M. Woolsey declared that the book was not obscene so could be legally published in the USA. This decision prompted the publication of several versions of Ulysses over the next couple of years, including the Random House edition (1934), the Limited Editions Club edition with illustrations by Henri Matisse (1935), and the Bodley Head edition (1936). In 1938, Joyce finished Finnegans Wake ; the following year it was published simultaneously in London and New York. In September 1939, World War Two broke out and the Joyce family moved back to neutral Zurich. On 13 January 1941 Joyce died, following surgery on a perforated ulcer. He was buried in Fluntern cemetery, Zurich, foregoing Catholic last rites. Nora died ten years later and was buried separately in Fluntern. Both bodies were reburied together in 1966.

To see the work of Ezra Pound, contemporary champion of Joyce's fiction, visit the Pound section of the website.

• [1] Richard Ellmann, James Joyce , (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 48.
• [2] Jeri Johnson, ‘A Chronology of James Joyce’, in James Joyce, Ulysses , (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. lxiii-lxix (p. lxiv).
• [3] John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920, (Dublin, The Lilliput Press, 2001), pp. 74-5.
• [4] Richard Ellmann (ed.), Selected Letters of James Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 156-196.
• [5] For more information on Joyce's cinema, see John McCourt (ed.), Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010) – especially chapters one and two. Also see my 3-minute lecture on Joyce and cinema .
• [6] For an in-depth look at this prolific writing period, see John McCourt, The Years of Bloom , pp. 191-253.
• [7] For a detailed account of the composition of Ulysses , see Luca Crispi, 'Manuscript Timeline 1905-1922', Genetic Joyce Studies , 4 (2004), freely available online at: http://www.geneticjoycestudies.org/GJS4/GJS4%20Crispi.htm .
• [8] For more information of Joyce’s meeting with Eisenstein, see Gösta Werner, ‘James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein’, James Joyce Quarterly , 27:3 (1990), 491-507.

If reusing this resource please attribute as follows: James Joyce: A Biography at http://writersinspire.org/content/james-joyce-biography by Cleo Hanaway, licensed as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK).

James Joyce

Some important facts of his life.

A groundbreaking modernist author of all times, James Joyce, earned significant success in life. He gained immense popularity on account of his thoughtful ideas and novel experiments with writing techniques and style that inspired and spellbound his audiences . His style includes experimentation with characterization , dialogues , and structure. For instance, his much-appreciated work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as an Artist, presents the complex structure that renders the narrative from a conventional beginning, middle, and end. He also blends dialogues in the text without following any proper speech marks or indentation.

Some Important Works of James Joyce

James joyce’s impact on future literature.

James Joyce’s distinct writing style and literary qualities of his masterpieces brought praiseworthy changes in European literature. His distinctive writing approach and unique expression have won him accolades among his contemporaries. Also, he had a significant influence on a diverse range of writers and critics, writers and other influential figures including Samuel Beckett, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Cormac McCarthy, David Lodge, Joseph Campbell, and Salman Rushdie. He expressed his ideas in such a unique style that young writers still consider him an icon and an inspiration.

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Joyce, James

James Stephen Atherton

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes Mary M. Talbot & Bryan M. Talbot

Dr. Mary M.Talbot is daughter of James S. Atherton and in this graphic novel she gives a very interesting account of how her father dealt with James Joyce, specially Finnegans Wake

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1983

Gisèle Freund, Time Cover, 1939, May 8

Nearly all Joyce's works are imaginative reconstructions of his own life and early environment and, although too close an identification of the author with his fictional counterpart can mislead, a knowledge of his life history helps toward understanding his work. Early life and work James Augustine Joyce (he rarely used his middle name after about 1907) was born at Rathagar, Dublin, on February 2, 1882. At that time the burning question was that of Irish Independence (Home Rule), and the Irish leader was Charles Stewart Parnell, John Stanislaus Joyce, Jame's father, was an ardent follower of Parnell, for whom he worked as election agent, an occupation for which his sociable temperament and ready tongue made him very suitable. In 1880 he had succeeded in getting two Parnellites returned as members of Parliament for Dublin and, partly as a reward, had been appointed collector of taxes for the city at the then considerable salary of £500 a year. Soon after, he married Mary Jane Murray, from Longford. With his salary, an income of £315 a year from inherited property, and what was left of his grandfather's 21st birthday present of £1000, the young pair began married life in comfortable circumstances. James was their eldest son, and when he was six and a half (September 1888), he was sent to Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school that has been described as "the Eton o! Ireland." Such evidence as survives suggests that he was happy there. But his father was not the man to stay affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs, and borrowed money from his office. The dividing line came in 1890 - 91 with Parnell's fall following the scandal over the O'Shea divorce, and in John Joyce's mind the two events were airways connected. He believed that, with his leader, he has been betrayed and suspected that the Catholic clergy were somehow responsible. The facts suggest a different interpretation: he had been absent from his office without permissions while campaigning for the Parnelite candidates in Cork, and there were deficiencies in his accounts, which he eventually met by mortgaging his property. The new Irish Local Government Act had abolished his position, and he was not appointed to the equivalent one that replaced it, although he vas allowed a pension. His son James shared his view, and wrote, at the age of nine, a poem attacking T M. Healy, who, with Michael Davitt, led the Irish opposition to Parnell. The poem was printed at his father's expense, but no copy is known to, survive.

During the years that followed, the Joyce family sank deeper and deeper into poverty. Ten children survived infancy, and they became accustomed to conditions of increasing sordidness, subject to visits from debt collectors, having household goods frequently in pawn, and often moving to another house, leaving the rent and tradesmen's bills unpaid. James did not return to Clongowes after the summer vacation of 1891 but - apart from some months at a Christian Brothers' school, which he never afterward mentioned - stayed at home for the next two years and, according to his brother Stanislaus' autobiography, My Brother's Keeper (1958), tried to educate himself, asking his mother to check his work. In April 1893, both brothers were admitted, without fees, to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. James did well there academically and was twice elected president of the Marian Society, a position virtually that of head boy. He left, however, under a cloud, as it was thought (correctly) that he had lost his Catholic faith. He entered University College, Dublin, then staffed by Jesuit priests, although their control was limited by the Royal University Act of 1879. There he was taught neither theology nor philosophy. He studied languages, reserving his energies for extracurricular activities, reading widely - particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits - and taking an active part in the college's literary and Historical Society, Greatly admiring Henrik Ibsen, he learned Dano-Norwegian to read the original and had an article, "Ibsen's New Drama" - a review of When We Dead Awaken - published in the London Fortnightly Review in 1899 just after his 18tjh birthday. This early success confirmed Joyce in his resolution to become a writer and persuaded his family, friends and teachers that the resolution was justified. In October 1901 he published an essay, "The Day of Rabblement" attacking the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Dublin Abbey Theatre) for catering to popular taste Joyce had previously supported the theatre and had refused to join a students' protest against the "heresy" of William Butler Yeats' Countless Cathleen . His next publication was in the unofficial college magazine, Saint Stephen's , in May 1902. An essay, "James Clarence Mangan", on an Irish poet who, Joyce claimed, was unjustly neglected, it was written in an over-elaborate prose and based on a highly praised lecture he had given to the students' society.

He was leading a dissolute life at this time but worked sufficiently hard to pass his final examinations, matriculating with "second class honours in Latin" and obtaining the degree of B.A. on October 31', 1902. Never did he relax his efforts to master the art of writing. He wrote verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called "epiphanies". The word means the manifestations, by the gods, of their divinities to mortal eyes. But Joyce used it to describe his accounts of moments when the real truth about some person or object was revealed. His experiments were useful in helping him to develop a concise style while recording accurate observation His lifeLong care in preserving g his work, for future use is first shown in the use He made of his "epiphanies" in his next two books. To support himself while writing, he decided to become a doctor, but after attending a few lectures in Dublin, he borrowed what money he could and went to Paris. After a fortnight there, during which he found that fees were payable in advance and his Dublin qualifications insufficient, he returned home for a month's holiday on December 23, 1902, and became friendly with Oliver St. John Gogarty, whom he later pilloried as Mulligan in Ulysses . On returning to Paris he abandoned the idea of medical studies, wrote some book reviews and, on the proceeds of these and of a few English lessons, with small remittances from his mother, he studied in the Sainte-Genevieve Library and compiled notes on a theory of aesthetics he was evolving from Aristotle, Aquinas and Flaubert. The notes and the book reviews were published in Critical Writings of James Joyce (ed. E.Mason and R.Ellmann, a1959)

Recalled home in April 1903 because his mother was dying, he tried various occupations, including teaching and lived at various addresses, including (from September 9-19, 1904) the Martello Tower at Sandycove, now Ireland's Joyce Museum. He had begun writing a lengthy naturalistic novel, Stephen Hero , based on the events of his own life, when in 1904 George Russell (AE) offered £1 each for some simple short stories with an Irish background to appear in a farmers' magazine, The Irish Homestead . In response Joyce began writing the stories published as Dubliners (1914). Three stories, "The Sisters," "Eveline," and "After the Race," had appeared under the pseudonym Stephen Daedalus before the editor decided that Joyce's work was not suitable for his readers. Meanwhile Joyce had met, on June 10, a girl named Nora Barnacle. He met her next on June 16, the day that, mainly in celebration of their meeting, he chose as what is known as "Bloomsday" (the day of his novel Ulysses ). On June 16 he fell in love with her, and eventually persuaded her to leave Ireland with him, although he refused, on principle, to go through a ceremony of marriage.

Trieste - 1905 Joyce and Nora left Dublin together in October 1904. Joyce obtained a position in the Berlitz School, Pola, working in his spare time at his novel and short stories. In 1905 they moved to Trieste, where James's brother Stanislaus joined them and where their children, George and Lucia, were born. In 1907, while giving English lessons to a Triestine businessman, Ettore Schimitz, he learned that Schimitz had written under the name Italo Svevo but had become discouraged. Joyce admired his work and exerted influence to obtain recognition for it. In 1906-07, for eight months, he worked at a bank in Rome, disliking almost everything he saw. Ireland seemed pleasant by contrast; he wrote to Stanislaus that he had not given credit in his stories to the Irish virtue of hospitality and began to plan a new story "The Dead." The early stories were meant, he said, to show the paralysis form which Dublin suffered, but they are written with a vividness that arises from his success in making every word and every detail significant. His studies in European literature had interested him in both the Symbolists and the Realists; his work began to show a synthesis of these two rival movements. He decided that Stephen Hero lacked artistic control and form and rewrote it as "a work in five chapters" under a title - A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man - intended to direct attention to its focus upon the central figure. In Trieste, too, Joyce wrote, but never tried to publish, a poetical short story, Giacomo Joyce, describing his feelings toward one of his pupils Amalia Popper, whose father was named Leopoldo and whose Jewish charms contributed to the character of Molly Bloom. The manuscript, found among Stanislaus' papers, was edited and published with a foreword by Richard Ellmann in 1968. In 1909 he visited Ireland twice to try publish Dubliners and set up a chain or Irish cinemas. Neither effort succeeded and he was distressed when a former friend told him that he had shared Nora's affections in the summer of 1904. Another old friend proved this to be a lie. Joyce's reactions can still be read in a series of letters now in the Cornell University Library. Only the milder passages could b e published in the "collected" Letters of James Joyce ; the series as a whole includes some of the most astonishing examples of erotica ever written. Joyce always felt that he had been betrayed and the theme of betrayal runs through much of his later work. So, almost equally, does that of tenderness. "The Dead" mentions a boy named Michael Furey who dies for love of the heroine, Greta. He is based on a boy called Michael Bodkin, who had once courted Nora. On his next and final visit to Ireland in 1912, Joyce visited "the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried", and he brought its "crocked crosses" into the closing cadences of his story. But printers' objections to the themes, to the frequent mention of real places and people, and to occasional use of the word bloody prevented the publication of Dubliners till 1914, by which time A Portrait of the Artist was being serialized in The Egoist (a review financed by Harriet Shaw Weaver). Both publications were favourably reviewed.

Zurich - 1915. When Italy declared war in 1915 Stanislaus was interned, but James and his family were allowed to go to Zurich. At first, while he gave private lessons in English and worked on the early chapters of Ulysses - which he had first thought of as another short story about a "Mr. Hunter" - his financial difficulties were great. He was helped first by a grant of £75 from the Royal Literary Fund; then by a large grant from Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick; and finally by a series of grants from Miss Weaver, which by 1930 amounted to more than £23000. Her generosity resulted partly from her admiration for his work and partly from her sympathy with his difficulties, for, as well as poverty, he had to contend with eye diseases that never really left him. From February 1917 until 1930 he endured a series of 25 operations for iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts, sometimes being for short intervals totally blind. Despite this he kept up his spirits and continued working, some of his gayest passages being composed when his health was at its worst. Unable to find an English printer willing to set up A Portrait of the Artist for book publication, Miss Weaver published it herself, having the sheets printed in the United States where it was also published, on December, 29, 1916, by B W Huebsch, in advance of the English Egoist Pres edition . Encouraged by the acclaim given to this, in March 1918, the American Little Review began to publish episodes from Ulysses , continuing until the work was banned in December 1920.

Paris - 1920 After World War I Joyce returned for a few months to Trieste, then - at the invitation of Ezra Pound - in July 1920 he went to Paris. Ulysses was published there on February 2, 1922, by Sylvia Beach, proprietor of a bookshop called "Shakespeare & Co". The book, already well known because of the censorship troubles, became immediately famous. Joyce had prepared for its critical reception by having a lecture given by Valery Larbaud who pointed out the Homeric correspondences in it and that "each episode deals with a particular art or science, contains a particular symbol, represents a special organ of the human body, has its particular colour… proper technique, and takes place at a particular time."

Joyce never published this scheme (See table); indeed he even deleted the chapter titles in the book as printed. It may be that this scheme was more useful to Joyce when he was writing that it is to the reader. Sometimes the technical devices become too prominent, particularly in the much praised "Oxen of the Sun" chapter (11, 11) where the language goes through every stage in the development of English prose from Anglo-Saxon to the present day to symbolize the growth of a fetus in the womb. The execution is brilliant, but the process itself seems ill-advised. More often the effect is to add intensity and depths, as, for example, in the "Aeolus" chapter (II, 4) set in a newspaper office, with rhetoric as the "art" Joyce inserted into it hundreds of rhetorical figures and many references to winds - something "blows up" instead of happening, people "raised by the wind" when they are getting money and the reader becomes aware o f an unusual liveliness in the very texture of the prose. The famous last chapter, in which we follow the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom as she lies in bed, gains much of its effect from being written in eight huge unpunctuated paragraphs. Nevertheless, the main strength of the book lies in its depth of character portrayal and its breadth of humour. Joyce claimed to have taken his "stream-of-consciousness" technique from a forgotten French writer, Edouard Dujardin (1861-1949), who had used the monologue intérieure in his novel Les Lauriers son coupés (1888), but many critics have pointed out that it is at least as old as the novel, although no one before Joyce had used it so continuously.

In Paris Joyce worked on Finnegan's Wake , the title of which was kept secret, the novel being known simply as "work in Progress" until published in its entirety in May 1939. In addition to his chronic eye troubles Joyce suffered great and prolonged anxiety over his daughter's mental health. What had seemed slight eccentricity grew into unmistakable and sometimes violent mental disorder that Joyce tried by every possible means to cure, but it became necessary to place her in a mental hospital near Paris. In 1931 he and Nora visited London, where they were married, his scruples having yielded to his daughter's complaints.

Meanwhile he wrote and rewrote sections of his new book; often a passage was revised more than 14 times before he was satisfied. Every word, every letter was scrutinized and pondered over. He usually began with a simple narrative. Basically the book is, in one sense, the story of a publican in Chapelizod, near Dublin, his wife, and their three children; but Mr. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Mrs., Anna Livia Plurabelle, Shem, Saun and Isabel are every family of mankind, the archetypal family about whom all mankind is dreaming. The 18th century Italian Giambattista Vico provides the basic theory that history is cyclic; to demonstrate this the book begins with the end of a sentence left unfinished on the last page. Ideally it should be bound in a circle. It is thousands of dreams in one. Languages merge: Anna Livia has "vlossy-hair"- wlossy being Polish for "hair"; "a bad of wind" blows; bad being Turkish for "wind." Characters from literature and history appear and merge and disappear as "the intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators" dream on. On another level, the protagonists are the city of Dublin and the River Liffey which flows enchantingly through the pages, "leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia." An throughout the book James Joyce himself is present, joking, mocking his critics, defending his theories, remembering his father, enjoying himself.

Despite much scholarly study the book remains imperfectly understood; Joyce said he expected his readers to spend their lives on his book. It will remain a book for the minority, but it will always be loved by that minority. Since its publication it has had a great effect on many serious writers, as well as providing a new technique of word distortion and word creation for writers of advertisements.

After the fall of France in World War II (1940), Joyce took his family back to Zurich, where he died on January 13, 1941, still disappointed with the reception given to his last book. He would be pleased to know that, of the two periodicals now dealing with his work, one is entirely devoted to Finnegan's Wake. Major Works

Novels and Stories: Dubliners (1914), 15 short stories; "The sisters", An Encounter," "Araby", "Eveline", " After the Race,""Two Gallants,""The Boarding House," "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," "Clay," "A Painful Case," " Ivy Day in the Committee Room," "A Mother," " Grace" and "The Dead"; A Portrait o the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), Finnegan's Wake (1939), sections published as parts of Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937. Verse : Chamber Music (1937); Pomes Penyeach (1927); Collected Poems (1936) Play : Exiles (1918) Bibliography: The definitive biography, Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959), is reliable and exhaustive. Critical studies of the works are very numerous; a list to December 1961 is given in R H Deming. A Bibliography of James Joyce Studies (1964). The most concise account is A.Walton Litz, James Joyce (1966), which contains a well selected bibliography with helpful comments. H. Blamires, The Bloomsday Book (1966), is the best single guide for anyone reading Ulysses for the first time. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, new ed. (1960) gives an intimate account of Joyce at work. For the earlier works Marvin Magalaner, Time of Apprenticeship (1959); and a collection of essays, James Joyce's Dubliners (1969) contain useful material; and R.Choles and K M Kain, The Workshop of Daedalus (1965) reprints Joyce's Epiphanies and the Pola and Trieste notebooks. No fully satisfactory account of Finnegan's Wake has yet been written. W Y Tindall, A Reader's Guide to Finnegan's Wake (1969), is the most up-to-date comprehensive study but is not always reliable; Adaline Glasheen, A Second Census of Finnegan's Wake (1963), provides necessary identifications. The James Joyce Quarterly (1963- ) gives regular surveys of current critical work; A Wake Newsletter (1962- ) now published by English Department of Dundee University, Scotland, continues explicating Finnegan's Wake .

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James Joyce

Born: February 2, 1882 Rathgar, Ireland Died: January 13, 1941 Zurich, Switzerland Irish author

James Joyce was an Irish author who experimented with ways to use language, symbolism (having one thing to stand for another), interior monologue (characters talking to themselves), and stream of consciousness (the uninterrupted, continuous flow of a character's thoughts).

Early years

James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, Ireland, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland. His father had several jobs including a position as tax collector for the city of Dublin. His mother, Mary Jane Murray Joyce, was a gifted piano player. James's father was not very successful, and the family had to move fourteen times from the time James was born until he left Ireland.

Joyce was educated entirely in Jesuit (a Catholic religious order) schools in Ireland. He did very well in the study of philosophy (the study of humans and their relationship to the universe) and languages. After his graduation in 1902, he left Ireland for the rest of his life. After that he lived in Trieste, Italy; Zurich, Switzerland; and Paris, France, with his wife and two children.

Early fiction

Most of Joyce's fiction is autobiographical, that is, it is based on his own life experiences. Even though he left his native country, his work is based mainly on Ireland, family, and Roman Catholicism.

Joyce's Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories. He finished writing the work in 1904, but it could not be published until ten years later because the British government thought it contained things that offended the king. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, is a semi-autobiographical (based on the author's own life) novel of adolescence (the teenage years). It is the story of Stephen Dedalus, a young writer who rebels against the surroundings of his youth. He rejects his father, family, and religion, and, like Joyce, decides at the novel's close to leave Ireland. His name comes from Greek mythology (stories that tell of gods or explain natural occurrences). In the myth Dedalus made a maze to hold the Minotaur (a monster that was half man and half bull). He was jailed in the labyrinth with his son, Icarus. In order to escape, he made wings of feathers and wax, but Icarus flew too near the sun, which melted the wax causing him to die when he plunged into the sea. For Joyce and others after him, Stephen Dedalus became a symbol for all artists. Stephen appears again in Ulysses, perhaps Joyce's most respected novel.

Joyce published Ulysses in 1922. Many consider it Joyce's most mature work. It is patterned after Homer's Odyssey. Homer was a Greek poet who produced his works around 850 B.C.E. Each of the eighteen chapters is related to a part of the original Greek epic (long poem that tells a heroic story), but there are other sources, too. The action takes place in a single day, June 16, 1904. It tells the story of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, and how the actions of each person touches the others during that day. Ulysses is considered one of the most important books in the development of the modern novel. To tell this story, Joyce used what he called the stream of consciousness. Using this technique Joyce permits the reader to enter the consciousness (thoughts) of his characters, listen to parts of conversations, experience what the characters feel, and relive their memories.

Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake is the most difficult of all of Joyce's works to understand. It was published in 1939. The novel has no real plot. Instead, it relies upon sound, rhythm of language, and puns (word jokes). These parts create a surface and the meanings are under that surface. Most people consider Finnegans Wake to be a novel, but others have called it a poem. The novel was not well-received, and Joyce relied on the help of friends for financial assistance after it was published.

Joyce knew his family was not safe in France when it was taken over by the Germans during World War II (1939–45; a war in which Germany, Japan, and Italy fought against France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States). He borrowed money and fled to Switzerland with his family. Joyce died in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13, 1941. He is considered one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century.

The modern novel owes much to James Joyce. His understanding of philosophy, theology (religious studies), and foreign languages enabled him to use the English language in exciting new ways. His novel Ulysses was brought to trial on charges of obscenity (being offensive) in the United States, but Joyce was found innocent. This marked a breakthrough on how subject matter and language could be used in the modern English novel.

For More Information

Anderson, Chester G. James Joyce and His World. London: Thames & Hudson, 1967.

Beja, Morris. James Joyce: A Literary Life. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992.

Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. New York: Norton, 1965.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

O'Brien, Edna. James Joyce. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999.

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Poet Biographies

James Joyce: The Life and Works of an Iconic Poet

James Joyce, an influential Irish poet and novelist, revolutionized the literary world with his avant-garde style and complex narratives, which explored themes of identity, language, and the human condition.

Hailed as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Joyce was an Irish poet, prose writer, and novelist who was known for his experimental style that took the literary world by storm. His poems, novels, and short stories expressed a mastery of language whilst exploring the human condition. James Joyce’s literary legacy extends far beyond his own lifetime. He inspired many future writers that came after him, such as  Seamus Heaney ,  Sylvia Plath ,  T.S. Eliot , Ezra Pound , and  Elizabeth Bishop .

About James Joyce

• 1 Early Life
• 2 Education
• 3 Italy and Switzerland
• 4 Financial Difficulties and Literary Successes
• 5 Later Life and Death
• 6 Famous Poems
• 7 Influences

James Joyce was born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland February of 1882. He was the oldest of ten surviving children born to parents John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray. In 1887, Joyce’s father was made a rate collector for the Dublin Corporation. This change of employment instigated a move to the town of Bray, just outside of Dublin.

The young boy’s education began at Clongowes Wood College in 1888. The institution was a Jesuit school. He was faced with leaving in 1892 when his father was no longer able to afford the tuition. It is known that one of Joyce’s earliest pieces was written in 1891 in reaction to the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. He studied at home for a time before enrolling in the Belvedere College. Three years later, he was studying English, French, and Italian at University College Dublin.

Joyce was very active in the art scene while at university. In 1900 a review he wrote was published in The Fortnightly Review. This was his first published work. He also wrote articles and two plays during this period. Those he befriended in school made their way, in many instances, into his later works. These included some of his closest associates, such as Oliver St. John Gogarty. He graduated in 1902 and went to Paris to study medicine. This professional choice did not last long, and he returned to England, claiming ill-health.

Soon after, his mother succumbed to cancer. Her death only increased the amount of time Joyce spent drinking. The poet managed to make a living for himself by publishing book reviews and taking on various teaching jobs. In 1904 Joyce tried for the first time to have  A Portrait of the Artist  published. It was later rewritten as  A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man . The following months were spent in Dublin, where he continued to drink. He met and began a relationship with Nora Barnacle. Later that year, in October, Joyce would find himself in Pola in Austria-Hungary with Nora, which is now modern-day Pula, Croatia, where he held a position at the Berlitz School. The two moved to Zurich, Switzerland, and then to Trieste, Italy, in the latter part of 1905.

Italy and Switzerland

While in Italy, Nora gave birth to the couple’s first child, George. Their residence in the city did not last long, and soon Joyce moved the family to Rome, where he found work as a bank clerk. Again, he was unhappy, returning to Trieste in 1907. It was around this time that his daughter Lucia was born. In 1909 Joyce returned to Dublin along with his son. It was his intention to visit his father and to have his collection of stories, Dubliners, published. This work was deeply inspired by Irish nationalism and the search for the Irish identity. Each story is centered around a certain character’s epiphany or sudden understanding. These usually revolved around something personal. The work was not published until 1914. It was during this time that Joyce published a number of stories under the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus. Under this name, he created The Sisters , Eveline , and After the Race .

In 1914 a number of his poetic works were included in the Imagist Anthology created by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot after the pair noticed the quality of James Joyce’s poetry . Pound described Joyce’s poem ‘ Chamber Music ‘ as having ‘quality and distinction.’

Financial Difficulties and Literary Successes

Upon returning to Trieste, Joyce wrote poetry, such as  ‘Gas from a Burner.’  During these years, Joyce was still desperate to support his family. He spent time trying to work as a cinema magnate, planning to import Irish tweed to Italy, and borrowing money to keep his family from becoming homeless. The only income he was receiving came from the teaching position he maintained, along with his private lessons.

Joyce moved to Zürich at the start of the first world war. Here he became interested in socialism. It was his goal, after moving yet again to Paris, to finish his great  novel ,  Ulysses . The work chronicles a day in the life of a Dublin inhabitant Leopold Bloom, turning an ordinary day in the city into a modern version of Homer’s Odyssey . The book was finally finished in October 1921 and published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922 by Sylvia Beach. It became widely considered a masterpiece by critics and scholars alike. Interestingly, due to the state of censorship in Great Britain and the United States, Joyce made the choice to publish  Ulysses  in France.

Luckily, this period also saw his reputation grow into that of an  avant-garde  writer. The good news came alongside the bad as his eyes began to deteriorate. He had a number of procedures throughout his life to try to correct them, often having to wear an eyepatch. The outbreak of World War II had a significant impact on the direction of Joyce’s life, as upon the Nazi occupation of France, Joyce moved to Zürich again.

Later Life and Death

Joyce was prolific well into the later part of his life. In 1939, Joyce published another one of his most renowned works Finnegans Wake . However, On January 13, 1941, after undergoing surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer, Joyce fell into a coma. He woke once two days later to ask for his wife before dying fifteen minutes later. He was fifty-eight years old. After his funeral, he was buried in Fluntern Cemetery in Zürich.

Since his death, Joyce’s work has come to influence writers such as Samuel Beckett and  John Updike .  Ulysses  is considered one of the major works of the  Modernist movement . His life and work are celebrated every year on 16th June on Bloomsday.

Famous Poems

James Joyce was responsible for a number of iconic works. Here are some of his most famous poems:

• ‘ Ecce Puer ‘
• ‘ She Weeps over Rahoon ‘
• ‘ Nightpiece ‘
• ‘ Alone ‘
• ‘ Flood ‘
• ‘ On the Beach at Fontana ‘
• ‘ Simples ‘
• ‘ Tutto Sciolto ‘
• ‘ A Prayer ‘
• ‘ The twilight turns from amethyst ‘
• ‘ At That Hour ‘ 
• ‘ Bahnhofstrasse ‘ 
• ‘ Be Not Sad ‘
• ‘ Dear Heart, Why Will You Use Me So? ‘ 
• ‘ Go Seek Her Out ‘ 
• ‘ He Who Hath Glory Lost ‘ 
• ‘ I Hear an Army ‘

Like many of the great poets of our time, James Joyce’s style was somewhat impacted by his literary heroes and inspirations. Some of these included Henrik Ibsen , Homer, Dante, William Shakespeare , and Gustave Flaubert.

Joyce’s work continues to be celebrated today, and he has gone down as one of the greatest poets of the modern era. Due to this, many future poets have seen his works as the pinnacle and have inspired them on their journeys. These poets include the likes of  John Ashbery , Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Elizabeth Bishop.

James Joyce’s most famous book is Ulysses , which he published in 1922. The story is set in Dublin and mirrors Homer’s Odyssey .

James Joyce’s poetry style consisted of his experimental use of language, his attention to detail,  humor , and the use of stream of consciousness .

James Joyce is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and his work has had a profound influence on modern literature. He was known for his innovative style and technique, complexity and depth, and unique portrayal of Dublin.

James Joyce is considered to be a modernist writer for several reasons, such as his narrative experimentation, multiple perspectives , exploration of consciousness, rejection of traditional structures, and themes of alienation and disillusionment.

On January 13, 1941, Joyce fell into a coma after undergoing surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer. He woke once two days later to ask for his wife before dying fifteen minutes later. He was 58 years old.

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James Joyce Introductions

Introductions to a literary pioneer.

James Joyce is by many considered the most influential writer of the 20th century. His works, from the early "Dubliners" to the semi-biographical "Portrait" to the groundbreaking "Ulysses" and the challenging "Finnegans Wake," have forever altered the literary world.

Below is a curated list of introductory books about his life and work that can inspire, challenge, and intrigue.

Joyce's Enduring Influence

James Joyce revolutionized literature with his experimental storytelling techniques, influencing a plethora of writers like Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett. His works continue to shape modern literature, with themes of identity, sexuality, and human relationships resonating deeply with readers and writers. Joyce's legacy as a literary innovator is unquestionable, with his works remaining vital study subjects and sources of inspiration.

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James Joyce

James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. He attended Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, and he received a BA from the Royal University in Dublin.

In 1904 Joyce left Dublin with Nora Barnacle; the couple had two children and eventually married in 1931. From 1904 to 1905, they lived in Pola, Austria-Hungary, where Joyce published his first literary work, the satirical poem “The Holy Office.” They went on to live in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, returning to Ireland only rarely.

Joyce published his first book of poetry, Chamber Music (Elkin Matthews), in 1907. He is also the author of the poetry collection Pomes Penyeach (Shakespeare and Company, 1927). In 1936 The Black Sun Press published Joyce’s Collected Poems , which included the poems from his previous two collections alongside the poem “Ecce Puer,” written in 1932.

A review , sometimes attributed to T. S. Eliot , of Chamber Music in The Egoist reads, “Mr. Joyce is probably something of a musician; it is lyric verse, and good lyric verse is very rare. It will be called ‘fragile,’ but it is substantial, with a great deal of thought behind fine workmanship.”

Joyce is best known for his works of fiction, including Ulysses (Shakespeare and Company, 1922), the focus of several incendiary literary controversies; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (B. W. Huebsch, 1916); and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914). He also published Exiles: A Play in Three Acts (Grant Richards, 1918). Together, his works represent a major contribution to avant-garde modernism and to twentieth-century English literature.

Joyce suffered from a series of ocular illnesses, and he spent periods of his later life partially or totally blind. He died of complications from an intestinal surgery on January 13, 1941, in Zurich, Switzerland.

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Biography of James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, just south of Dublin in a wealthy suburb called Rathgar. The Joyce family was initially well off as Dublin merchants with bloodlines that connected them to old Irish nobility in the country. James' father, John Joyce, was a fierce Irish Catholic patriot and his political and religious influences are most evident in Joyce's two key works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

As a result of their steadily diminishing wealth and income, the Joyce family was repeatedly forced to move to more modest residences and John Joyce's habitual unemployment as well as his drinking and spending habits, made it difficult for the Joyces to retain their previous social standing. A young James Joyce was sent away to the renowned Clongowes School in 1888?a Jesuit institution that was regarded as the best preparatory school in Ireland. The Clongowes school figures prominently in Joyce's work, specifically in the story of his recurring character Stephen Dedalus. Joyce earned high marks both at the Clongowes School and at Belvedere College in Dublin where he continued. At this point in his life, it seemed evident that Joyce was to enter the priesthood, a decision that would have pleased his parents. As James Joyce made contact with various members of the "Irish Literary Renaissance," his interest in the priesthood waned. Indeed, Joyce became increasingly critical of Ireland and its conservative elements, especially the Church.

In opposition to his mother's wishes, Joyce left Ireland in 1902 to pursue a medical education in Paris, and did not return to Ireland until the following year upon news of his mother's debilitation and imminent death. After burying his mother, Joyce continued in Ireland, working as a schoolteacher at a boys' school?another autobiographical detail that recurs in the story of Stephen Dedalus. After barely spending a year in Dublin, Joyce returned to the Continent, drifting in and out of medical school in Paris before taking up residence in Zurich. It was during this period that Joyce began writing professionally.

In 1905, Joyce completed a collection of eight stories, entitled Dubliners, though it was not until 1913 that the volume was actually printed. During these frustrating and impoverished years, Joyce heavily relied upon the emotional support of Nora Barnacle, his unmarried Irish lover, as well as the financial support of his younger brother, Stanislaus Joyce. Both Nora and Stanislaus remained as protective, supporting figures for the duration of the writer's life. During the eight years between Dubliners' completion and publication, Joyce and Barnacle had two children, a son named Giorgio and a daughter named Lucia.

Joyce's next major work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, appeared in serialized form in 1914 and 1915, before Joyce was "discovered" by Ezra Pound and the complete text was printed in New York in 1916, and in London in 1917. It was with the assistance of Pound, a prominent literary figure of the time, that Joyce came in contact with Harriet Shaw Weaver, who served as both editor and patron while Joyce wrote Ulysses.

When Ulysses was published in Paris in 1922, many immediately hailed the work as genius. With his inventive narrative style and engagement with multiple philosophical themes, Joyce had established himself as a leading Modernist. The novel charts the passage of one day?June, 16 1904?as depicted in the life of an Irish Jew named Leopold Bloom, who plays the role of a Ulysses by wandering through the streets of Dublin. Despite the fact that Joyce was writing in self-imposed exile, living in Paris, Zurich and Trieste while writing Ulysses, the novel is noted for the incredible amount of accuracy and detail regarding the physical and geographical features of Dublin.

Thematically similar to Joyce's previous works, Ulysses examines the relationship between the modern man and his myth and history, focusing on contemporary questions of Irish political and cultural independence, the effects of organized religion on the soul, and the cultural and moral decay produced economic development and heightened urbanization. While Joyce was writing the epic work, there was serious doubt as to whether Ulysses would be completed. Midway through his writing, Joyce suffered the first of eleven eye operations to salvage his ever-worsening eyesight. At one point, a disappointed Joyce cast the bulk of his manuscript into the fire, though Nora Barnacle immediately rescued it.

While Ulysses was hailed by some, the novel was banned from both the United Kingdom as well as the United States on obscenity charges. It was not until 1934, that Random House won a court battle that granted permission to print and distribute Joyce's Ulysses in the United States; two years later, the novel was legalized in Britain.

By that time, Joyce was approaching the end of his public career having concluded his work on a final novel entitled Finnegan's Wake. Considered to be far more baffling and convoluted than Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake was a critical failure, ostracizing Joyce from many of his former admirers. At the outbreak of World War II, Joyce remained in Paris until he was forced to move?first to Vichy and then to Switzerland. On January 13, 1941, James Joyce died of a stomach ulcer at the age of 58, and was buried in Zurich's Fluntern Cemetery. Though his prestige had faded towards the end of his life, Joyce regained literary stature in the decades following his death and Ulysses now stands as the definitive text of the Anglo-American modernist movement, marking Joyce's creative genius and premier abilities as a stylist of the English language.

Study Guides on Works by James Joyce

Dubliners james joyce.

In 1905, the young James Joyce, then only twenty-three years old, sent a manuscript of twelve short stories to an English publisher. Delays in publishing gave Joyce ample time to add three accomplished stories over the next two years: "Two...

• Study Guide
• Lesson Plan

Exiles James Joyce

Exiles is a written play by James Joyce that includes three acts; the manuscript was written in 1914, finished in 1915, and published in 1918. Despite the efforts made by Joyce and American poet and critic Ezra Pound, to whom Joyce had shown the...

Finnegans Wake James Joyce

Published in 1939, Finnegans Wake is James Joyce’s final work and one that defies the ability of most readers. Those with the intellectual foundation and experiential backbone to make their way through this dense, confusing, innovative and...

James Joyce: Short Stories James Joyce

The birth of James Joyce on February 2, 1882 was perfectly timed to introduce him to the literary world at the dawn of the twentieth century. Joyce would go on to dominate century by writing what is routinely voted its greatest novel, Ulysses . In...

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was first published in serial form in the Egoist in the years 1914-15. Chronicling the life of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to young adulthood and his life-changing decision to leave Ireland, the...

Ulysses James Joyce

Ulysses, a Modernist reconstruction of Homer's epic The Odyssey, was James Joyce's first epic-length novel. The Irish writer had already published a collection of short stories entitled Dubliners, as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young...

12 Facts About James Joyce

June 16, 1904, is the day that James Joyce, the Irish author of Modernist masterpieces like Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , and who was described as “a curious mixture of sinister genius and uncertain talent,” set his seminal work, Ulysses . It also thought to be the day that he had his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. To this day, fans around the world know June 16 as “Bloomsday,” after one of the book's protagonists. 

But you don't need to wait until June to learn more about James Joyce. Here are 12 facts about the man who was as mythical as the myths he used as the foundations for his own work.

1. James Joyce was only 9 years old when his first piece of writing was published. 

In 1891, shortly after he had to leave Clongowes Wood College when his father lost his job, 9-year-old Joyce wrote a poem called “Et Tu Healy?” It was published by his father John and distributed to friends; the elder Joyce thought so highly of it, he allegedly sent copies to the Pope.

No known complete copies of the poem exist, but the precocious student’s verse allegedly denounced a politician named Tim Healy for abandoning 19th century Irish nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell after a sex scandal. Fragments of the ending of the poem, later remembered by James’s brother Stanislaus, showed Parnell looking down on Irish politicians:

His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time Where the rude din of this century Can trouble him no more

While the poem was seemingly quaint, young Joyce equating Healy as Brutus and Parnell as Caesar marked the first time he’d use old archetypes in a modern context, much in the same way Ulysses is a unique retelling of The Odyssey.

As an adult, Joyce would publish his first book, a collection of poems called Chamber Music , in 1907. It was followed by Dubliners , a collection of short stories, in 1914, and the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (in which Clongowes Wood College is prominently featured) in 1916.

2. James Joyce caused a controversy at his college's paper.

While attending University College, Dublin, Joyce attempted to publish a negative review —titled “The Day of the Rabblement”—of a new local playhouse called the Irish Literary Theatre in the school’s paper, St. Stephen’s . Joyce’s condemnation of the theater’s “parochialism” was allegedly so scathing that the paper’s editors, after seeking consultation from one of the school’s priests, refused to print it.

Incensed about possible censorship, Joyce appealed to the school’s president, who sided with the editors—which prompted Joyce to put up his own money to publish 85 copies to be distributed across campus.

The pamphlet, published alongside a friend’s essay to beef up the page-count, came with the preface: “These two essays were commissioned by the editor of St. Stephen’s for that paper, but were subsequently refused insertion by the censor.” It wouldn’t be the last time Joyce would fight censorship.

3. Nora Barnacle ghosted James Joyce for their first planned date.

By the time Nora Barnacle and Joyce finally married in 1931, they had lived together for 27 years, traveled the continent, and had two children. The couple first met in Dublin in 1904 when Joyce struck up a conversation with her near the hotel where Nora worked as a chambermaid. She initially mistook him for a Swedish sailor because of his blue eyes and the yachting cap he wore that day, and he charmed her so much that they set a date for June 14—but she didn’t show.

He then wrote her a letter, saying, “I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me—if you have not forgotten me!” This led to their first date, which supposedly took place on June 16, 1904.

She would continue to be his muse throughout their life together in both his published work (the character Molly Bloom in Ulysses is based on her) and their fruitful personal correspondence. Their notably dirty love letters to each other—featuring him saying their love-making reminded him of “a hog riding a sow” and signing off one by saying “Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little  f **kbird !"—have highlighted the NSFW nature of their relationship. In fact, one of Joyce’s signed erotic letters to Nora fetched a record £240,800 ($446,422) at a London auction in 2004.

4. James Joyce had really bad eyes. 

While Joyce’s persistent money problems caused him to lead a life of what could be categorized as creative discomfort, he had to deal with a near lifetime of medical discomfort as well. Joyce suffered from anterior uveitis, which led to a series of around 12 eye surgeries over his lifetime. (Due to the relatively unsophisticated state of ophthalmology at the time, and his decision not to listen to contemporary medical advice, scholars speculate that his iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts could have been caused by sarcoidosis, syphilis, tuberculosis, or any number of congenital problems.) His vision issues caused Joyce to wear an eye patch for years and forced him to do his writing on large white sheets of paper using only red crayon . The persistent eye struggles even inspired him to name his daughter Lucia, after St. Lucia, patron saint of the blind.

5. James Joyce taught English at a Berlitz Language School.

In 1904, Joyce—eager to get out of Ireland—responded to an ad for a teaching position in Europe. Evelyn Gilford , a job agent based in the British town of Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, notified Joyce that a job was reserved for him and, for two guineas, he would be told exactly where the position was. Joyce sent the money, and by the end of 1904, he and his future wife, Nora, had left Dublin for the job at a Berlitz language school in Zurich, Switzerland—but when they got there, the pair learned there was no open position. But they did hear a position was open at a Berlitz school in Trieste, Italy. The pair packed up and moved on to Italy only to find out they’d been swindled again.

Joyce eventually found a Berlitz teaching job in Pola in Austria-Hungary (now Pula, Croatia). English was one of 17 languages Joyce could supposedly speak ; others included Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, and Italian (which eventually became his preferred language, and one that he exclusively spoke at home with his family). He also loved playwright Henrik Ibsen so much that he learned Norwegian so that he could read Ibsen's works in their original form—and send the writer a fan letter in his native tongue. (One friend, however, insists  Joyce's ability to speak 17 languages was a joke.)

6. James Joyce invested in a movie theater. 

There are about 400 movie theaters in Ireland today, but they trace their history back to 1909, when Joyce helped open the Volta Cinematograph, which is considered “the first full-time, continuous, dedicated cinema” in Ireland.

More a money-making scheme than a product of a love of cinema, Joyce first got the idea when he was having trouble getting Dubliners published and noticed the abundance of cinemas while living in Trieste. When his sister, Eva, told him Ireland didn’t have any movie theaters, Joyce joined up with four Italian investors (he’d get 10 percent of the profits) to open up the Volta on Dublin’s Mary Street.

The venture fizzled as quickly as Joyce’s involvement. After not attracting audiences due to mostly showing only Italian and European movies unpopular with everyday Dubliners, Joyce cut his losses and pulled out of the venture after only seven months.

The cinema itself didn’t close until 1919, during the time Joyce was hard at work on Ulysses. (It reopened with a different name in 1921 and didn’t fully close until 1948.)

7. James Joyce turned to a completely inexperienced publisher to release his most well-known book.

The publishing history of Ulysses is itself its own odyssey. Joyce began writing the work in 1914, and by 1918 he had begun serializing the novel in the American magazine Little Review with the help of poet Ezra Pound.

But by 1921, Little Review was in financial trouble. The published version of Episode 13 of Ulysses , “Nausicaa,” resulted in a costly obscenity lawsuit against its publishers, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, and the book was banned in the United States. Joyce appealed to different publishers for help—including Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press—but none agreed to take on a project with such legal implications (and in the Woolf’s case, length), no matter how supposedly groundbreaking it was.

Joyce, then based in Paris, made friends with Sylvia Beach , whose bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, was a gathering hub for the post-war expatriate creative community. In her autobiography , Beach wrote:

All hope of publication in the English-speaking countries, at least for a long time to come, was gone. And here in my little bookshop sat James Joyce, sighing deeply. It occurred to me that something might be done, and I asked : “Would you let Shakespeare and Company have the honour of bringing out your Ulysses?” He accepted my offer immediately and joyfully. I thought it rash of him to entrust his great Ulysses to such a funny little publisher. But he seemed delighted, and so was I. ... Undeterred by lack of capital, experience, and all the other requisites of a publisher, I went right ahead with Ulysses.

Beach planned a first edition of 1000 copies (with 100 signed by the author), while the book would continue to be banned in a number of countries throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Eventually it was allowed to be published in the United States in 1933 after the case United States v. One Book Called Ulysses deemed the book not obscene and allowed it in the United States.

8. Ernest Hemingway was James Joyce's drinking buddy—and sometimes body guard.

Ernest Hemingway—who was major champion of Ulysses —met Joyce at Shakespeare and Company, and was later a frequent companion among the bars of Paris with writers like Wyndham Lewis and Valery Larbaud.

Hemingway recalled the Irish writer would start to get into drunken fights and leave Hemingway to deal with the consequences. "Once, in one of those casual conversations you have when you're drinking," Hemingway said , "Joyce said to me he was afraid his writing was too suburban and that maybe he should get around a bit and see the world. He was afraid of some things, lightning and things, but a wonderful man. He was under great discipline—his wife, his work and his bad eyes. His wife was there and she said, yes, his work was too suburban--'Jim could do with a spot of that lion hunting.' We would go out to drink and Joyce would fall into a fight. He couldn't even see the man so he'd say, 'Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!'"

9. James Joyce met another modernist titan—and had a terrible time.

Marcel Proust’s gargantuan, seven-volume masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu , is perhaps the other most important Modernist work of the early 20th century besides Ulysses . In May 1922, the authors met at a party for composer Igor Stravinsky and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev in Paris. The Dubliners author arrived late, was drunk, and wasn’t wearing formal clothes because he was too poor to afford them. Proust arrived even later than Joyce, and though there are varying accounts of what was actually said between the two, every known version points to a very anticlimactic meeting of the minds.

According to author William Carlos Williams, Joyce said, “I’ve headaches every day. My eyes are terrible,” to which the ailing Proust replied, “My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me. In fact, I must leave at once.”

Publisher Margaret Anderson claimed that Proust admitted, “I regret that I don’t know Mr. Joyce’s work,” while Joyce replied, “I have never read Mr. Proust.”

Art reviewer Arthur Power said both writers simply talked about liking truffles. Joyce later told painter Frank Budgen, “Our talk consisted solely of the word ‘No.’”

10. James Joyce created a 100-letter word to describe his fear of thunder and lightning.

Joyce had a childhood fear of thunder and lightning , which sprang from his Catholic governess’s pious warnings that such meteorological occurrences were actually God manifesting his anger at him. The fear haunted the writer all his life, though Joyce recognized the beginnings of his phobia . When asked by a friend why he was so afraid of rough weather, Joyce responded, “You were not brought up in Catholic Ireland.”

The fear also manifested itself in Joyce’s writing. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , the autobiographical protagonist Stephen Dedalus says he fears “dogs, horses, firearms, the sea, thunderstorms, [and] machinery.”

But the most fascinating manifestation of his astraphobia is in his stream of consciousness swan song, Finnegans Wake , where he created the 100-letter word Bababadalgharaghtaka-mminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk to represent a symbolic biblical thunderclap. The mouthful is actually made up of different words for “thunder” in French ( tonnerre ), Italian ( tuono ), Greek ( bronte ), and Japanese ( kaminari ).

11. James Joyce is thought to be a genius, but not everyone was a fan.

Fellow Modernist Virginia Woolf didn't much care for Joyce or his work. She compared his writing to "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples," and said that "one hopes he’ll grow out of it; but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely."

She wasn't the only one. In a letter, D.H. Lawrence—who wrote such classics as Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover — said of Joyce: “My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”

“Do I get much pleasure from this work? No," author H.G. Wells wrote  regarding  Finnegans Wake . “ ... Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?”

Even his partner Nora had a difficult time with his work, asking after the publication of Ulysses , “Why don’t you write sensible books that people can understand?”

12. James Joyce's supposed final words were as abstract as his writing.

Joyce was admitted to a Zurich hospital in January 1941 for a perforated duodenal ulcer, but slipped into a coma after surgery and died on January 13. His last words were befitting his notoriously difficult works—they're said to have been, "Does nobody understand?"

For more fascinating facts and stories about your favorite authors and their works, check out Mental Floss's new book, The Curious Reader : A Literary Miscellany of Novels and Novelists , out May 25!

A version of this story originally ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2021.

Poems & Poets

James Joyce

One of the most influential and innovative writers of the 20th century, James Joyce was the author of the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). His collections of poetry include Chamber Music (1907) and Pomes Penyeach (1927).   Joyce was born in a suburb of Dublin. He attended a Jesuit school until his parents could not afford the tuition, and then Belvedere College (where he was awarded tuition) and University College, Dublin. Upon graduation, Joyce moved to Paris and, after 1904, returned to Ireland only sporadically. He lived in Trieste with his partner and later wife, Nora Barnacle, and their children. During World War I the family lived in Zurich, moving to Paris after the war, and then to the South of France before the Nazi invasion. The family was living in Zurich when Joyce died.   Joyce’s novels, with their innovative language, use of dialogue, characteristic modernist forms, and social frankness, met with resistance when they first appeared in print. Ulysses was serialized in the United States and England before Sylvia Beach, of the bookstore Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, published it as a complete book. It was banned in the United States from 1922 until 1933.   Joyce’s first published book was Chamber Music , a collection of 36 love poems. His poetry was noticed by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and included in Pound’s influential Imagist Anthology of 1914. Pound wrote of Chamber Music : “the quality and distinction of the poems in the first half … is due in part to their author’s strict musical training … the wording is Elizabethan, the metres at times suggesting Herrick.” Known as a lyric poet, Joyce based some of his poems on songs. His poems have been set to music by composers including Geoffrey Moyneux Palmer, Ross Lee Finney, Samuel Barber, and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, as well as the group Sonic Youth. Despite his poetic success, Joyce is better known as a novelist, and by 1932 he had stopped writing poetry altogether.

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Ulysses of James Joyce

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• University of Oxford - Great Writers Inspire - James Joyce: A Biography
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After World War I Joyce returned for a few months to Trieste , and then—at the invitation of Ezra Pound —in July 1920 he went to Paris . His novel Ulysses was published there on February 2, 1922, by Sylvia Beach , proprietor of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company . Ulysses is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer ’s Odyssey . All of the action of the novel takes place in Dublin on a single day (June 16, 1904). The three central characters—Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce’s earlier A Portrait of the Artist ), Leopold Bloom , and his wife, Molly Bloom —are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus , Ulysses , and Penelope . Many of the novel’s characters are also based on real-life friends, family members, and acquaintances of Joyce; for example, Stephen’s friend “stately, plump Buck Mulligan” is modeled on Oliver St. John Gogarty . By the use of interior monologue , Joyce reveals the innermost thoughts and feelings of these characters as they live hour by hour, passing from a public bath to a funeral, library, maternity hospital, and brothel.

The main strength of Ulysses lies in its depth of character portrayal and its breadth of humor. Yet the book is most famous for its use of a variant of the interior monologue known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. Joyce claimed to have taken this technique from a largely forgotten French writer, Édouard Dujardin , who had used interior monologues in his novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888; We’ll to the Woods No More ), but many critics have pointed out that it is at least as old as the novel, though no one before Joyce had used it so continuously. Joyce’s major innovation was to carry the interior monologue one step further by rendering, for the first time in literature , the myriad flow of impressions, half thoughts, associations, lapses and hesitations, incidental worries, and sudden impulses that form part of the individual’s conscious awareness along with the trend of rational thoughts. This stream-of-consciousness technique proved widely influential in much 20th-century fiction.

The technical and stylistic devices in Ulysses are abundant, particularly in the much-praised “Oxen of the Sun” chapter (Episode 14), in which the language goes through every stage in the development of English prose from Anglo-Saxon to the present day to symbolize the growth of a fetus in the womb. The effect of these devices is often to add intensity and depth, as, for example, in the “Aeolus” chapter (Episode 7) set in a newspaper office, with rhetoric as the theme. Joyce inserted into it hundreds of rhetorical figures and many references to winds—something “blows up” instead of happening, people “raise the wind” when they are getting money—and the reader becomes aware of an unusual liveliness in the very texture of the prose. The famous last chapter of the novel, in which readers follow the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom as she lies in bed, gains much of its effect from being written in eight huge unpunctuated paragraphs.

Read about the obscenity court case and banning of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses .

Ulysses , which was already well known because of censorship troubles, became immediately famous upon publication. Joyce had prepared for its critical reception by having a lecture given by Valery Larbaud , who pointed out the Homeric correspondences in it and that “each episode deals with a particular art or science , contains a particular symbol, represents a special organ of the human body , has its particular colour…proper technique, and takes place at a particular time.” Joyce never published this scheme; indeed, he even deleted the chapter titles in the book as printed. It may be that this scheme was more useful to Joyce when he was writing than it is to the reader.

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The Secret Life of James Joyce

A special Parody episode of "History Re-Uncovered," we delve into the newly discovered private diary of Nora Barnacle, the wife and muse of the literary legend James Joyce. Revered for his g... Read all A special Parody episode of "History Re-Uncovered," we delve into the newly discovered private diary of Nora Barnacle, the wife and muse of the literary legend James Joyce. Revered for his groundbreaking impact on 20th-century literature, Joyce's creative process has long been a ... Read all A special Parody episode of "History Re-Uncovered," we delve into the newly discovered private diary of Nora Barnacle, the wife and muse of the literary legend James Joyce. Revered for his groundbreaking impact on 20th-century literature, Joyce's creative process has long been a subject of intrigue and speculation. Now, nearly a century later, we partner with esteemed... Read all

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• August 29, 2024 (United States)
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• $1,000 (estimated)

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