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The celebrated Irish novelist, poet, and essayist James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. He was the eldest of ten children in a middle-class family, which fell into poverty during his childhood. He attended Clongowes Wood College until his father could no longer pay his tuition, after which he studied at the Christian Brothers O’Connell School. A Jesuit priest and friend of the family procured free places at Belvedere College for Joyce and his brother Stanislaus. He went on to University College, where he studied English, French, and Italian. He was soon a fixture of Dublin’s literary and dramatic communities, writing reviews and radical essays about the arts scene as well as poetry, plays, and short stories.
After graduating from the Royal University of Ireland, Joyce traveled to Paris to study medicine, where he stayed on after giving up on the career path. He returned to Ireland in 1903 to be with his mother during her final sickness. In 1904, he met Nora Barnacle, a Galway chambermaid and his lifelong companion; he would go on to memorialize the occasion of their first date, June 16th, as the day on which his famed novel Ulysses was set. Later that year, the pair left Ireland for Zürich and Pola, then settled in Trieste. Joyce would live primarily in Trieste until 1920 and return to Ireland only three more times in his life.
In Trieste, Joyce taught English at the Berlitz school for several years. He worked on the novel Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; his short story collection, Dubliners; his play, Exiles; and, in later years, Ulysses. Because of the provocative nature of his work, Joyce struggled to find a publisher. He worked in Rome as a bank clerk for a time, drawing inspiration from the city for his short story “The Dead.” His children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born in 1905 and 1907, and his poetry collection Chamber Music was published in 1907.
In 1914, the London publisher Grant Richards finally agreed to publish Dubliners. Joyce also began corresponding with Ezra Pound, who became an advocate for Joyce’s work and convinced the founder of The Egoist to serialize A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This also brought the financially struggling, often ailing Joyce to the attention of The Egoist’s editor Harriet Shaw Weaver, who contributed to Joyce’s upkeep for the rest of his life. During World War II, Joyce and his family fled to Zürich. There, he rubbed shoulders with fellow expats such as Stefan Zweig, who brought Exiles to the stage. After the war, Joyce’s family returned to Trieste, then settled in Paris, which became their primary residence for the next two decades.
Upon completing Ulysses, Joyce once again had trouble finding a publisher, especially after installments of the novel published in The Little Review were met with obscenity charges. However, Joyce had become close with Sylvia Beach, proprietress of the famous Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, and she opted to publish the novel under her store’s imprint. From 1923 onward, Joyce worked on his final novel, Finnegans Wake, persevering through partial and total blindness, ill health, and the decline of his daughter’s mental state. He also published the poetry collection Pomes Penyeach during this time. Joyce and Nora Barnacle married in Kensington, London, in 1931. In 1939, Finnegans Wake was published, and the following year, after the Nazis invaded France, the family fled to Zürich. Joyce died in Zürich on January 13th, 1941.
Although censored and criticized during his lifetime, Joyce has had a long and powerful afterlife as an influence on literature the world over. Ulysses, which thematically intertwines The Odyssey with a day in 1904 Dublin, is widely considered one of the greatest books of the 20th century for its experimental style, rich and innovative use of language, and avant-garde modernist approach to plot, character, and form.
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More James Joyce
Text: Read poems by Joyce at the Academy of American Poets
Video: Watch performances of excerpts from Ulysses at the Hammer Museum
Text: Read an excerpt of Djuna Barnes' 1922 interview of Joyce at The Marginalian