James Joyce

* 1882 in Dublin (IRE) – died 1941 in Zurich (CH). In his novels the city of Dublin gains a universal identity like Homer's Mediterranean or Biblical Jerusalem, transcendental, yet ruthlessly realistic. But he had left the city early for the European continent. Joyce lived first in Trieste (I) with Nora Barnacle, his wife, then taking refuge from war-torn Europe in neutral Zurich. In 1915 he started work on what was to become one of the most modern and influential novels of the 20th century, «Ulysses.» He reconstructed an entire Dublin day in June 1904 and made it the stuff of a modern epic, full of real people, real places, real names and topical allusions. The modern Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, steers his way through a city which is by turns beguiling, hospitable or oppressive. Although Joyce's candid descriptions of human organs at work caused the book to be banned in Britain and the United States for many years after its publication by the courageous Sylvia Beach in Paris in 1922, «Ulysses» earned him international acclaim.
Joyce, who had moved to Paris in 1920, was based there for nearly twenty years. He worked for seventeen years on his last novel, the complex «Finnegans Wake,» in which Dublin is once again the centre of the universe and the theatre of all human history and language. The book appeared in May 1939, on the eve of the war and the occupation of France but failed to repeat the tremendous success of «Ulysses.»

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(See further materials at: www.jamesjoyce.ie)