James Joyce

Born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the eldest surviving child of a father whose unpredictable finances dragged the family through more than a dozen addresses. He was educated at the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, excelling despite the domestic chaos, and graduated from University College Dublin in 1902. In 1904, on June 16, the date he would later immortalize as Bloomsday, he went on his first outing with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Galway who became his lifelong companion. They left Ireland together that October and lived in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris for the rest of his life, though he returned to Dublin three times and never stopped writing about it. Dubliners (1914), a collection of stories of crystalline precision, took nearly a decade to publish because of printer's objections to its content. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) reinvented the autobiographical novel through stream of consciousness. Ulysses (1922), first published by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company in Paris, tracked Leopold Bloom through a single Dublin day in eighteen episodes that paralleled Homer's Odyssey, deploying every conceivable literary style. It was banned for obscenity in Britain and the United States for over a decade. Finnegans Wake (1939) pushed language itself to its breaking point. Joyce suffered from severe eye problems throughout his adult life and underwent more than twenty operations. He died in Zurich on January 13, 1941, after surgery for a perforated ulcer, at the age of fifty-eight.