James Joyce
1882–1941
James Joyce was an Irish novelist and short story writer who spent most of his adult life in voluntary exile in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris — while writing obsessively about Dublin. Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) established him as a major realist. Ulysses (1922) reinvented what a novel could do. Finnegans Wake (1939) reinvented what language could do. He is the central figure of literary modernism.
Works
Dubliners
Fifteen stories of Dublin life — from childhood to old age, from the mundane to the devastating. Joyce's 1914 collection introduced the 'epiphany' as a literary technique and contains 'The Dead,' one of the finest short stories in English.
Ulysses
A single day — 16 June 1904 — in Dublin, narrated through the interior consciousnesses of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus. Published in 1922, Joyce's novel is the supreme achievement of literary modernism, mapping Homer's Odyssey onto the texture of ordinary urban life.