JAMES JOYCE was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin. He was the eldest of ten surviving children of Mary Jane and John Joyce. Joyce's father was a Collector of Rates, but the family had already begun its slide into poverty. Joyce was first educated in Jesuit schools and entered Royal University (now University College, Dublin) in 1898. Four years later, Joyce left Dublin for Paris with the intention of studying medicine, but his reading soon turned toward Aristotle and Homer. In 1903 his mother's illness brought him back to Dublin. On June 16, 1904, he went out for the first time with Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway. In October of the same year the couple left for the Continent. They were to return to Ireland only three more times in Joyce's life, and never again after 1912. Joyce lived out the rest of his life in Italy, France, and Switzerland.

The young couple (not married until 1931) went first to Pola, but soon moved to Trieste, where Joyce was employed by the Berlitz School. Except for a seven-month sojourn in Rome, the couple lived in Trieste for the next eleven years. Despite the challenges of difficult publishers, glaucoma, and a growing family (a son and a daughter), Joyce wrote the poems included in Chamber Music (1907), the stories for Dubliners (including "The Dead"), and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which first appeared in installments in The Egoist. Joyce's first attempt at this autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, was published posthumously in 1944.) By the time of the couple's move to Zurich in 1915, he had already begun Ulysses.

He continued to work on Ulysses over the next seven years, first in Zurich, later in Paris. Partial serial publication of Ulysses in the Little Review (1917-18) brought a slew of legal problems, including a conviction on obscenity. Joyce's friend, Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare and Company book shop in Paris, published the book on February 2, 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday.

Ulysses brought Joyce international notoriety and placed the author at the center of a literary movement only later known as modernism. Joyce had begun to stretch the boundaries of modernism with his next work, known only as Work in Progress, which occupied him for the next sixteen years until it was published in 1939 as Finnegans Wake.

By this time Europe was on the brink of war. When Germany invaded France, the Joyces left Paris, eventually settling in Zurich. It was here Joyce died in 1941 after an operation for a perforated ulcer. He was buried in Fluntern Cemetery.

photo credit: Carl Van Vechten

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