James Joyce

James Joyce reconstructed the novel around the interior of the mind and spent most of his life outside Ireland writing about Dublin. Born in Rathgar in 1882, he was the eldest surviving of ten children of a father whose drinking and improvidence moved the family through a succession of poorer addresses. He was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes and Belvedere and took a degree at University College Dublin. He left for the continent in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Galway, and lived in Trieste, Zurich and Paris for the rest of his life, teaching English at Berlitz and depending on patrons, particularly Harriet Shaw Weaver. Dubliners, fifteen stories ending with The Dead, took nine years to reach print because publishers objected to its language and to the naming of real premises. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man followed in 1916. Ulysses covers a single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904 — the date of his first walk with Nora — mapping Leopold Bloom's wanderings onto the Odyssey and writing each episode in a different style, ending with Molly Bloom's unpunctuated soliloquy. It was serialised in America until an obscenity prosecution stopped it, published in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, and banned in the United States until 1934. Finnegans Wake took seventeen more years and is written in a dream language of multilingual puns. He had severe eye disease, undergoing about a dozen operations, and his daughter Lucia was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He died in Zurich in 1941 after surgery for a perforated ulcer.

• Lived: 1882 CE – 1941 CE
• Nationality: Irish
• Roles: writer