James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland on February 2, 1882. His large Catholic family saw its fortunes diminish steadily throughout his childhood. Much of what takes place in his novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, parallels events in Joyce's early life, such as his intellectual development and his break with the Catholic Church. He attended Clongowes Wood College and University College, Dublin. At school, Joyce knew many Irish intellectuals, including W.B. Yeats. After graduation in 1902, Joyce escaped to Paris and briefly studied medicine. He returned to Dublin in 1903, when he learned his mother was dying. On June 16, 1904, he met Nora Barnacle, a hotel worker from Galway. During this time, he published stories as "Stephen Daedelus" and began work on the autobiographical material that would become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In December 1904, he and Nora left for Zurich, where Joyce planned to teach English, but wound up in Trieste. The pair did not marry (Joyce did not believe in marriage), but they lived together and had a son, Giorgio, and a daughter, Lucia.
Joyce spent years trying to get his story collection Dubliners published. Finished in 1907, it didn't appear until 1914, when the American poet Ezra Pound helped Joyce get the Portrait published in serial form in a literary philosophical magazine called The Egoist. It would not appear in book form until 1916. During WWI, Joyce worked to develop the material that would become Ulysses and battled glaucoma. In 1919, Harriet Shaw Weaver, the editor of The Egoist, became Joyce's patron. In 1920, the Joyces moved to Paris. Attempting to publish Ulysses was an ordeal, because so many publishers, printers, and others objected to the book's purported obscenity. Bookstore owner Sylvia Beach, a friend, finally published the book in 1922. The book was banned in the U.S. until 1934, when Random House won a court battle to publish it. (The judge's decision can be read as a foreword to the 1961 edition of the book.)
In 1923, Joyce began work on Finnegans Wake, parts of which were published in the following years under the title Work in Progress. Joyce was very nearly blind while working on this book, and relied on assistants to write down and type out passages, among them the writer Samuel Beckett. Meticulously planned, experimental, and unconventional in every sense, the Wake baffled even his staunchest supporters. Finnegans Wake appeared in book form in 1939, on the eve of WWII. In his personal life, Joyce suffered through the institutionalization of his daughter Lucia, who had for years exhibited symptoms of mental illness. In 1931, James and Nora Joyce were married at a London registry office, primarily for legal reasons. Because of the war, the Joyces left Paris in 1940 and settled in Zurich in December. After becoming ill with a perforated ulcer, Joyce died January 13, 1941, at age 58.
Contemporaries
Ezra Pound,
T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust
Milieu
Modernism
http://englishlit.about.com/arts/englishlit/library/eel/bl-joyj..htm?iam=mt#bio
©2000About.com,Inc.All
rights reserved.
©2000About.com,Inc. "MiningCo.com"
and "About.com" are trademark of About.com,Inc., a publicly traded company
listed on NASDAQ under the symbol "BOUT