James Joyce

James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2nd February 1882. He was educated at Jesuit schools and then at University College, Dublin, where he studied philosophy and languages. Dissatisfied with what he felt to be the narrowness and bigotry of Irish Catholic life, Joyce went to Paris for a year in 1902, where he began to write the lyric poems later collected in ‘Chamber Music’ (1907), his first published work. He returned to Dublin briefly in 1903, then left Ireland permanently with Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom he was to spend the rest of his life. Their home from 1905-1915 was Trieste, where Joyce taught English at the Berlitz school.

His first work of fiction, ‘Dubliners’, a collection of short stories, was published in London in 1914 to considerable acclaim. At this time, Joyce was befriended by the poet Ezra Pound and Harriet Shaw Weaver, who was to become Joyce’s lifelong benefactress.

Italy’s entrance into the First World War obliged Joyce to move to Zurich, where he remained until 1919. During this period he published his first novel, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (1916) and ‘Exiles’, a play (1918). After the war, Joyce moved to Paris where, despite difficulties with printers, publishers and censors, ‘Ulysses’ was published in 1922. That same year he began work on ‘Finnegans Wake’, and though much harassed by eye troubles, he completed and published the novel in 1939. ‘Pomes Penyeach’, a collection of verse, had appeared in 1927. In 1940, Joyce returned to Zurich where he died on 13th January 1941.