James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children of John Stanislaus Joyce, a charming, drunken, and improvident rate collector whose finances declined steadily through Joyce's childhood, moving the family through a long sequence of progressively shabbier addresses. Joyce was educated by the Jesuits — first at Clongowes Wood College, then, after the family could no longer afford it, at Belvedere College in Dublin — and the Catholic intellectual training stayed with him long after he had broken with the church. He read modern languages at University College Dublin, where he discovered Ibsen and decided, with characteristic certainty, that he intended to become the next great European writer.

He left Ireland in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Galway whom he had met that summer and who would become his lifelong partner and eventually his wife. They lived in Trieste, then Zurich, then Paris, supporting themselves at first by Joyce's English teaching at Berlitz and a chronically unsteady stream of patrons. He spent the rest of his life writing four books, all of them about Dublin, the city he never returned to after 1912. The pattern of his career — Irish material processed through European exile, increasing formal ambition, accelerating obscurity — is one of the foundational shapes of modernist literature.

Dubliners (1914), his first book, is a sequence of fifteen short stories arranged from childhood to public life and ending with "The Dead," the long final story that may be the most admired piece of short fiction in English. The stories are surface-realist and structurally precise; each turns on what Joyce called an epiphany, a sudden manifestation of spiritual significance in an apparently ordinary moment. The book took nine years to find a publisher willing to print it, partly because of objections to its naming of real Dublin establishments and its frank treatment of clerical and sexual matter.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a heavily revised version of an abandoned earlier novel, traces the consciousness of Stephen Dedalus from infancy through his decision to leave Ireland to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." The book's most famous innovation is the calibration of its prose to the developing mind of its protagonist — the opening pages are in baby talk; later chapters expand into the elaborate scholastic argument of Stephen's aesthetic theory. It remains, despite the longer shadow of Ulysses, the most accessible entry point into Joyce's work.

Ulysses (1922) recounts a single day in Dublin — Thursday, 16 June 1904, now celebrated as Bloomsday — through the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, the same character from Portrait. The novel's eighteen episodes correspond loosely to episodes of the Odyssey and rotate through a sequence of styles: interior monologue, newspaper headlines, parodies of English prose from Anglo-Saxon to contemporary, a play-script hallucination, a long unpunctuated soliloquy by Bloom's wife Molly that closes the book. Ulysses was prosecuted for obscenity in the United States and banned for over a decade; the 1933 ruling by Judge John Woolsey overturning the ban is one of the foundational decisions in modern obscenity law. The novel's reputation as forbiddingly difficult is partly deserved and partly inherited from a century of academic mediation. Read with a guide — Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated is the standard — it is funnier and more human than its reputation suggests.

Finnegans Wake (1939), which he worked on for seventeen years under the working title Work in Progress, is a dream-language novel of universal history that approaches unreadability by design. It has a small, devoted scholarly following and is unlikely ever to have a large one. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941, two years after its publication, from complications following surgery on a perforated ulcer.

For new readers: start with Dubliners, then Portrait, then Ulysses with a companion. Skip the Wake until you have read everything else.