James Joyce

Who is James Joyce?

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and became one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Though he spent most of his adult life in self-imposed exile in Trieste, Paris and Zurich, nearly all his fiction is rooted in the city of Dublin. His short-story collection Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) established his reputation, but it was Ulysses (1922) — a sprawling reimagining of Homer's Odyssey set over a single Dublin day, 16 June 1904 — that revolutionised the novel through its stream-of-consciousness technique. His final work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed language experimentation to its limits. Joyce's precise, encyclopaedic evocation of Dublin is celebrated worldwide each year on Bloomsday.

Sources: James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) · James Joyce, Dubliners (1914) · Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; rev. 1982)