AUTHOR

James Joyce was born in 1882 in Rathgar, Dublin. He was the eldest to survive in a family of four boys and six girls. James had been sent to Clongowes Wood College, a highly thought-of Jesuit school in County Kildare, but he was withdrawn in 1891 after three years there. He spent some time at a Christian Brothers’ school until Father Conmee, former rector of Clongowes, who knew him as a very promising pupil, kindly arranged for him to have a free place at Belvedere College, the Jesuit school in Dublin. Joyce proceeded to University College, Dublin, in 1898, where he studied English, French and Italian, and took his BA degree in 1902. Throughout his Belvedere days and his university days the home situation was deteriorating. John Joyce, boisterous, garrulous, and irresponsible as ever, was drinking and boasting the family into poverty. He moved the family rapidly from house to house to escape rent-hungry landlords, having sometimes first burned the house banisters for firewood. He was cruel to his wife and once when drunk tried to strangle her.

Joyce lived the life of an exile. He supported his family by teaching English in Trieste, in Zurich, and back again in Trieste.

Joyce’s short stories of Dublin characters, Dubliners, was published in 1914, and A Portrait of the Artist followed two years later. His masterpiece, Ulysses, on which he spent seven years, came out in 1922.

Ulysses is a big book. It compresses a vast panorama of life into its pages and exploits an elaborate system of symbols to make its situations applicable to people anywhere. The achievement inspired Joyce to an even longer and more ambitious work, Finnegans Wake(1937). The far-reaching experiments with language which he made in this work render it extremely difficult to read.

*Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce, Oxford University Press, New York, 1959.