James Joyce

Life

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest surviving child of a large family whose fortunes declined steadily through his childhood as his father drank and borrowed. He was educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere College and then at University College Dublin, where he studied modern languages and began publishing reviews. He had already rejected Catholicism and most of Irish nationalism by the time he graduated.

In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway, and in October of that year they left Ireland together. Apart from brief visits, the last in 1912, Joyce never lived in Ireland again. He taught English in Pola and Trieste, moved to Zurich during the First World War, and settled in Paris in 1920, where he stayed until the next war pushed him back to Zurich. His eyesight was poor and worsened; he underwent many operations. His daughter Lucia’s mental illness was a heavy burden in his later years. He died in Zurich in January 1941.

His books came slowly and with difficulty. Dubliners took nine years to find a publisher. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared in 1916, Ulysses in Paris in 1922 after serialization in an American magazine had led to an obscenity prosecution, and Finnegans Wake in 1939 after seventeen years of work.

Literary significance

Joyce is the central figure of literary modernism in English. Each of his four major prose works is more ambitious than the one before, and Ulysses in particular changed what a novel could attempt, in its use of interior monologue, its structure built on the Odyssey, and its shifts of style from chapter to chapter. It was banned in the United States until 1933 and in Britain and Ireland for longer, which added to its fame.

Every one of his books is set in Dublin, which he left at twenty-two and never stopped writing about. His influence runs through most serious fiction of the twentieth century, and June 16, the date on which Ulysses takes place, is celebrated as Bloomsday.

Where to start

Dubliners is the book to begin with and is in this library. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also here, is the natural second step, and Ulysses, likewise in the library, is for readers who have done the first two.