James Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish novelist who spent his adult life in exile in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, yet wrote only about Dublin. Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake transformed the twentieth-century novel.
Dublin
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Rathgar, Dublin, on 2 February 1882, the eldest surviving child of a large family that sank into poverty as his father lost his money. He was educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere colleges, then at University College Dublin.
In 1904, the year in which Ulysses is set, he met Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Galway. Their first walk together, on 16 June, is said to be the reason he chose that date for the novel. In October they left Ireland together.
Trieste and Zurich
Joyce taught English at the Berlitz school in Trieste, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and lived there for most of the next decade with Nora and their two children. Dubliners, finished in 1905, was refused or delayed by publishers for years for fear of libel and indecency, and only appeared in London in 1914.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was serialised in The Egoist from 1914 and published as a book in 1916, thanks to the support of the poet Ezra Pound and the editor Harriet Shaw Weaver. During the First World War the family lived in Zurich, where Joyce worked on Ulysses.
Ulysses and after
Ulysses, which follows Leopold Bloom through Dublin on a single day, was serialised in an American magazine until a court judged it obscene, and was published in Paris by the bookseller Sylvia Beach in February 1922. It was banned in the United States until 1933.
Joyce then spent seventeen years on Finnegans Wake (1939), written in a language of puns drawn from dozens of tongues. Troubled by failing eyesight, he fled occupied France for Zurich at the end of 1940 and died there in January 1941.
Anecdotes
Bloomsday
Every 16 June, readers around the world celebrate Bloomsday, the day on which Ulysses takes place. The first celebration was held in Dublin in 1954, on the fiftieth anniversary, when a group of writers set out to retrace the novel's itinerary.
Eleven years for a book
Dubliners was accepted by the London publisher Grant Richards in 1906, then held back over passages he feared would offend. A Dublin printer even destroyed the sheets of another edition in 1912. Richards finally published it in June 1914.
Frequently asked questions
What is Ulysses about?
It follows the advertising agent Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and the young Stephen Dedalus through Dublin on 16 June 1904, each episode echoing a part of Homer's Odyssey.
Why did Joyce leave Ireland?
He felt that Irish society, the Church and nationalism stifled the artist, and left in 1904 with Nora Barnacle. He returned only for brief visits, the last in 1912.
Where is James Joyce buried?
In Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich, where Nora was later buried beside him.