Although he published only three novels in his lifetime, Irish writer James Joyce (1882–1941) revolutionized Western literature. In his novels and short stories, Joyce introduced new literary techniques that were an enormous influence on twentieth-century authors and provided new ways for writers to capture the innermost thoughts and emotions of their subjects.
Born in Dublin, Joyce was educated at Jesuit schools. Although he rejected Roman Catholicism as a teenager, the church and its role in Irish society formed a recurring theme in Joyce’s work. His first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), tells the story of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, and his coming of age in a repressive Catholic culture, and it closely parallels Joyce’s own struggles.
On June 16, 1904, while struggling to begin his writing career, Joyce went on a first date with a hotel worker named Nora Barnacle (1884–1951). She would become his lifetime companion, and Joyce immortalized the date by setting his second novel, Ulysses, on the same day. (“Bloomsday,” named for the main character in Ulysses, is still celebrated annually by Joyce aficionados.)
Joyce and Barnacle intended to elope to Europe and moved to Trieste, a port city in what is now Italy, the next year. The couple had two children, but would not marry until 1931. Joyce supported the family by teaching English and borrowing money while attempting to publish his collection of short stories, Dubliners. It finally appeared in 1914.
After the outbreak of World War I, Joyce and Barnacle moved to neutral Zurich, where he worked on Ulysses, the novel that would be seen as his masterpiece. Joyce was in increasingly poor health and underwent numerous eye surgeries for glaucoma and cataracts while living in Switzerland. Joyce finished the novel in 1922.
Almost immediately upon its publication, Ulysses was hailed as one of the most consequential works of modern Western literature. The sprawling, 1,000-page book, which follows its hero Leopold Bloom through a single day in Dublin, employed a form of stream-of-consciousness narration that attempted to capture the unfiltered internal monologues of its characters without regard to punctuation or traditional narrative structure. Joyce followed Ulysses with Finnegans Wake (1939), an even denser and more difficult book that is rarely read outside of academia.
Joyce returned to Switzerland after the outbreak of World War II; he died in Zurich at age fifty-eight.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Ulysses was first published in Paris. It was banned in the United States until 1933, when a federal judge, John Monro Woolsey (1877–1945), ruled that the book was not obscene.
- According to Joyce biographer Peter Costello, the real-life model for Leopold Bloom was Alfred H. Hunter, a friend of the author’s in Dublin who had once rescued him in a bar fight.
- One of the short stories in Dubliners, “The Dead,” was turned into a feature-length film in 1987 by director John Huston (1906–1987) and starred his daughter, Anjelica Huston (1951–).
