Joyce, James (Augustine Aloysius)

born Feb. 2, 1882, Dublin, Ire.

died Jan. 13, 1941, Zürich, Switz.

Irish novelist.

Educated at a Jesuit school (though he soon rejected Catholicism) and at University College, Dublin, he decided early to become a writer. In 1902 he moved to Paris, which would become his principal home after years spent in Trieste and Zürich. His life was difficult, marked by financial troubles, chronic eye diseases that occasionally left him totally blind, censorship problems, and his daughter Lucia's mental illness. The remarkable story collection The Dubliners (1914) and the autobiographical novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), his early prose volumes, were powerful examples of his gift for storytelling and his great intelligence. With financial help from friends and supporters, including Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach (1887–1962), and Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961), he spent seven years writing Ulysses (1922), the controversial masterpiece (initially banned in the U.S. and Britain) now widely regarded by many as the greatest English-language novel of the 20th century. It embodies a highly experimental use of language and exploration of such new literary methods as interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness narrative. He spent 17 years on his final work, the extraordinary Finnegans Wake (1939), famous for its complex and demanding linguistic virtuosity.

James Joyce, photograph by Gisèle Freund, 1939.

Gisèle Freund

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