Strongly autobiographical and exuberantly inventive in its style, Joyce's great novel charts the Dublin childhood and youth of Stephen Dedalus.
Shaped by his experiences of early life at home where his father exerts a powerful influence, through bullying at school to an adolescent crisis of faith and student days, Stephen gradually emerges with a sense of his own destiny as poet, patriot and unbeliever. Determined to create his own individual voice while acknowledging his link with the community, his avowed aim is 'to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race'.
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. He was none the less 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 Croatia), 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. Joyce's 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 Zurich, 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 on which he had been working 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 Zurich, where he died on 13 January 1941. He was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery.
