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James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten surviving
children. He was educated by Jesuits at Clogowes Wood College and at
Belvedere College (just up the road from the Centre) before going on to
University College, then located on St Stephen’s Green, where he studied
modern languages. 
After he graduated from university, Joyce went to Paris, ostensibly to
study medicine, and was recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the
illness and subsequent death of his mother. He stayed in Ireland until
1904, and in June that year he met Nora Barncale, the Galway woman who
was to become his partner and later his wife.
In August 1904 the first of Joyce’s short stories was published in the
Irish Homestead magazine, followed by two others, but in October Joyce
and Nora left Ireland going first to Pola (now Pula, Croatia) where Joyce
got a job teaching English at a Berlitz school. After he left Ireland in
1904, Joyce only made four return visits, the last of those in 1912,
after which he never returned to Ireland.
Six months after their arrival in Pola, they went to Trieste where they
spent most of the next ten years. Joyce and Nora learned the local
Triestino dialect of Italian, and Italian remained the family’s home language
for many years. Joyce wrote and published articles in Italian in the
Piccolo della Sera newspaper and even gave lectures on English
literature. This portrait of Nora was painted by the Italian artist
Tullio Silvestri in Trieste just before World War One.
1914 proved a crucial year for Joyce. With Ezra Pound’s assistance, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s first novel, began to
appear in serial form in Harriet Weaver’s Egoist magazine in London. His
collection of short stories, Dubliners, on which he had been working
since 1904, was finally published, and he also wrote his only play,
Exiles. Having cleared his desk, Joyce could then start in earnest on the
novel he had been thinking about since 1907: Ulysses.
With the start of World War One, Joyce and Nora, along with their two
children, Georgio and Lucia, were forced to leave Trieste and arrived in
Zurich where they lived for the duration of the war. The family had
little money, relying on subventions from friends and family, people like
Harriet Weaver in London and Nora’s uncle in Galway. They often ended up
living in cramped, squalid accommodation as Joyce persisted in writing
Ulysses. In fact, Joyce never really had a room or an office of his own
in which to do his writing, and far from trying to block out the world
around him while he wrote, Joyce included things going on around him as
part of the book. So characteristics of friends of his in Trieste, Zurich
and Paris are given to characters in the book, and, most notably, Nora’s
characteristic language and writing becomes the voice of Molly Bloom in
the novel.
Though Joyce wanted to settle in Trieste again after the War, the poet
Ezra Pound persuaded him to come to Paris for a while, and Joyce stayed
for the next twenty years. The publication of Ulysses in serial form in
the American journal The Little Review was brought to a halt in 1921 when
a court banned it as obscene. Shortly after, Harriet Weaver ran out of
printers willing to set the text in England, and for a while it looked as
though Ulysses would never be published.
In July 1920, Joyce met Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate living in
Paris who owned and ran the bookshop Shakespeare & Co. In 1921, after
the American ban, Beach offered to publish Ulysses and finally, on 2nd
February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, the first edition of Ulysses
was published. Beach continued to publish Ulysses through 1930.
After Beach gave up the rights to Ulysses in 1930, much of Joyce’s
business was taken over by Paul Léon, a Russian Jewish émigré living in
Paris. As a close friend of Joyce and Joyce’s family, Léon also became
Joyce’s business advisor, looking after his correspondence and dealing
with his literary and legal affairs. The Léons’ apartment became a centre
for Joyce studies, and Léon and others met Joyce there to discuss
translations of Ulysses and the early serial publications of what became
Finnegans Wake.
For the next ten years Joyce and Léon were in almost daily contact and
Léon came to assume a role as necessary and important to Joyce and his
work as Sylvia Beach had played in the 1920s. Not only did he manage
Joyce’s legal, financial and daily existence,
much as Beach had during the years she published Ulysses, Léon played an
essential part in the composition and proofreading of Joyce’s last work.
Joyce’s last and perhaps most challenging work, Finnegans Wake was
published on 4 May 1939. It was immediately listed as “the book of the
week” in the UK and the USA.
In 1940, when Joyce fled to the south of France ahead of the Nazi
invasion, Léon returned to the Joyce’s’ apartment in Paris to salvage
their belongings and put them into safekeeping for the duration of the
war, and it’s thanks to Léon’s efforts that much of Joyce’s personal
possessions and manuscripts survived. Joyce died at the age of
fifty-nine, on 13 January 1941, at 2 a.m., in Schwesterhaus vom Roten
Kreuz in Zurich where he and his family had been given asylum . He is buried in
Fluntern cemetary, Zurich.
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