James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish writer and poet, a representative of modernism.

James Joyce was born in Rathgar, a district of Georgian houses on the south side of Dublin, into a large family of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray. Poor business management almost ruined his father, who was forced to change professions several times. The family moved several times from one area of Dublin to another. James managed to receive a good education, but the poverty and instability of his youth remained with him forever, and this was partly reflected in his works. Joyce himself often drew biographical parallels with the main character of some of his works and one of the central figures in his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus.

At the age of 6, Joyce enrolled in the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in Clane, and in 1893 he entered Belvedere College in Dublin, which he graduated from in 1897. A year later, James entered University College, from which he graduated in 1902.

In 1900, Joyce’s first publication appeared in the Dublin newspaper Two Week Review — an essay on Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken. At the same time, Joyce began writing lyric poetry. From 1916, he was published in the American literary magazine The Little Review, founded by Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson.

At the age of 20, Joyce left for Paris. This was his first departure for the continent, where, because of financial difficulties, he, like his father before him, often changed professions. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and so on. A year after he arrived in France, Joyce received a telegram saying that his mother was in serious condition, and he returned to Ireland. After his mother’s death in 1904, Joyce again left his homeland (settling in Trieste), this time together with the maid Nora Barnacle, whom he later married (27 years later).

Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Joyce and his wife moved to Zurich, where he began work on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and later on the first chapters of Ulysses. While moving around Europe, Joyce wrote poems, some of which were published in imag