James Joyce
James Joyce (1882-1941). Irish novelist. After a Jesuit education he left Ireland in 1904 and never returned there to live. He travelled with Nora Barnacle but did not marry her until 1931. They lived at various times in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. After writing Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories, Joyce turned to the novel with the autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). His best-known work, Ulysses (1922), took seven years to write and chronicles just 24 hours in the life of its hero. It was banned for obscenity for some years in Britain and the US but was published in Paris. In the novel Joyce used the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique to express the flow of thoughts and feelings of his central characters. In Finnegans Wake (1939), extracts of which were published from time to time in periodicals, Joyce used even more radical techniques. In later years he was nearly blind, despite many eye operations.
