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James Joyce
(1882–1941)
 The
eldest of ten children born in a Dublin suburb, Joyce was
educated at Jesuit schools—Clongowes Wood College in Clane
(1888–91) and Belvedere College in Dublin (1893–99)—and then
attended University College in Dublin (1899–1902). Although a
brilliant student, he was only sporadically interested in the
official curriculum. In 1902 he lived briefly in Paris and
returned to the Continent in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, the woman
who would eventually become his wife. For the next 25 years
Joyce, Nora, and their children lived at various times in
Trieste, Zürich, and Paris.
Joyce returned to
Ireland briefly in 1909 in a futile attempt to start a chain of
motion picture theaters in Dublin, and again in 1912 in an
unsuccessful attempt to arrange for the publication of the short
story collection Dubliners, which had to be abandoned due
to fears of prosecution for obscenity and libel. Although the
plates were destroyed, Dubliners was finally published in
England in 1914. A short volume of poetry, Chamber Music,
was his first published volume; it appeared in 1907. He
published two subsequent volumes of poetry, Pomes Pennyeach
(1927) and Collected Poems (1937).
Joyce and his family
spent the years of World War I in Zürich, where he finished his
novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It first
appeared in The Egoist, a periodical edited by Harriet
Shaw Weaver, and was published in book form in 1916. In 1917,
Joyce contracted glaucoma; for the rest of his life he would
endure pain, periods of near blindness, and many operations. At
this time he also wrote his only play, the Ibsenesque Exiles
(1918).
Ulysses,
written between 1914 and 1921, was published in parts in The
Little Review and The Egoist, but Joyce encountered
the same opposition to publishing the novel in book form that he
had confronted with Dubliners. It was published in Paris
in 1922 by Shakespeare & Company, a bookstore owned by Sylvia
Beach, an American expatriate. Its publication was banned in the
United States until 1933. For many years he lived mainly on
money donated by patrons, notably Harriet Shaw Weaver.
From 1922 until 1939
Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake (1939), a complex novel
that attempts to connect multiple cycles of Irish and human
history into the framework of a single night's events in the
family of a Dublin publican. In 1931 Joyce finally married Nora.
Her practical, sometimes cynical response to Joyce's work
provided a needed complement to his own self-absorption. Joyce
and Nora had a turbulent relationship; both were profoundly
affected by the progressive insanity of their daughter. Joyce
died in Zürich in 1941 after an operation for a perforated
duodenal ulcer.
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