James Joyce
was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882. He was the oldest of ten children
in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. He
was none the less educated at the best Jesuit schools and then at University
College, Dublin, where he gave proof of his extraordinary talent. In 1902,
following his
graduation, he went to Paris, thinking he might attend medical school
there, but he soon gave up attending lectures and devoted himself to writing
poems and prose
sketches, and formulating an "aesthetic system". Recalled to Dublin
in April 1903 because of the fatal illness of his mother, he circled slowly
towards his literary
career. During the summer of 1904 he met a young woman from Galway,
Nora Barnacle, and persuaded her to to go with him to the continent, where
he planned to
teach English. The young couple spent a few months in Pola (now in
Yugoslavia), then in 1905 moved to Trieste, where, except for seven months
in Rome and three
trips to Dublin, they lived until June 1915. They had two children,
a son and a daughter. His first book, the poems of "Chamber Music", was
published in London in
1907, and "Dubliners", a book of stories, in 1914. Italy´s entrance
into the First World War obliged Joyce to move to Zürich, where he
remained until 1919. During
this period he publishe "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man" (1916) and "Exiles", a play (1918). After a brief return to Trieste
following the armistice, Joyce
determined to move to Paris so as to arrange more easily for the publication
of "Ulyses", a book which he had been working on since 1914. It was,
in fact,
published on his birthday in Paris in 1922, and brought him international
fame. The same year he began work on "Finnegans Wake", and though much
harased by
eye troubles, and deeply affected by his daughter´s mental illness,
he completed and published that book in 1939. After the outbreak of the
second World War, he
went to live in Unoccupied France, then managed to secure permission
in December 1940 to return to Zürich. Joyce died there six weeks later,
on 13 January 1941,
and was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery.
