James Joyce

1882-1941. Author.

James Augustine Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and died at the age of 59 in 1941. He had three brothers and six sisters. Joyce came from a lower middle-class family which often had financial difficulties. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle who bore him a son and a daughter and who he married in 1931.

From 1888 to 1893 he visited Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boy's school and later on he went to Belvedere College, another Jesuit boy's day-school. In the following years Joyce studied several subjects at University College in Dublin and in 1902 he had a short enrollment at the Royal University Medical School. James Joyce was a born and bred Catholic. In 1889 he became an altar boy and in 1895 he entered the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But his faith dwindled in the course of his life and he was buried without the last rites of the Catholic Church.

Until 1915 he taught English in Trieste, then moved to Zurich with his wife and two children. In 1920 they settled in Paris, living in virtual poverty even after the successful publication of Ulysses in 1922. The intervention of literary friends such as Ezra Pound secured for Joyce some much-needed financial assistance from the British government.

Literary Interests:

James Joyce wrote and published several provocative papers and also reviewed plays by Ibsen, a contemporary Norwegian dramatist. Joyce was in contact with the most important poets of that time: W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He also formed a theatre group and won academic prizes for his papers in 1894 and 1897.

During the year 1914, Joyce and his family moved to Zurich, where they lived in great poverty while he worked on Ulysses. His novel began to appear in serial form in the Little Review in 1918, but was suspended in 1920 following prosecution for obscenity. The first unlimited edition followed in 1924 in Paris, but there was no American edition until ten years later, and no British edition until 1937.

Works:

Chamber Music (volume of poems) (1907)

Dubliners (collection of short stories) ( 1914)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (novel) (1914/1915)

Exiles (play) (1918)

Ulysses (novel) (1922)

Finnegans Wake (novel) (1939)

Sources:

Attridge, Derek . The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Birch, Dinah. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Connor, Steven. James Joyce, Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.