Book description
Joyce?s first major work, written when he was only twenty-five, brought
his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the
rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives
with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and
exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly
compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.
Approved - 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. Nonetheless, he was 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 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 Z rich, where he remained
until 1919. During this period he published 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 Ulysses, 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 harassed 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 Z rich. Joyce died there six weeks later, on 13
January 1941, and was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery.
