About the Author

James Joyce (1882-1941) was born in Dublin, the eldest of ten children in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. Nonetheless educated at the best Jesuit schools and at University College, Dublin, he moved to Paris in 1902 to attend medical school. Soon giving up on his lectures, however, he devoted himself to writing poems and prose sketches, aiming 'to give some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment' and comparing this process to 'the mystery of the Mass'. After living in Trieste for almost ten years with the Irish woman Nora Barnacle, he published Dubliners in 1914, going on to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Exiles in Zurich during the First World War. After the armistice he returned to Trieste briefly before moving to Paris, where he published Ulysses in 1922, bringing him international fame. Struggling through eye troubles and his daughter's mental illness, he completed and published Finnegans Wake in 1939. He died in Zurich two years later.