BIOGRAPHY

Irish novelist - perhaps the major 20th-century writer in English, Joyce was a master of language, exploiting its total resources. Educated in Dublin Jesuit schools, he lived after 1902 on the Continent, returning to Ireland only briefly. Dubliners, his short stories, was suppressed in Ireland because of topical references and published in London (1914). He spent World War I in Zürich, working on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), his first novel. Publication of Ulysses, written 1914-21, was delayed by obscenity charges; it did not appear in the U.S. until 1933. After 1922, Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake (1939). He died in Zürich in 1941. With each major work, Joyce's profundity and complexity grew. Dubliners centers on moments of spiritual insight he called epiphanies. A Portrait... is a fairly realistic autobiographical account of young Stephen Dedalus's growing realization that he must free himself from the narrowness of Irish society. Ulysses recounts the events of June 16, 1904, in the actions and thoughts of the salesman Leopold Bloom, his wife, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, now a teacher. The book follows the design of Homer's Odyssey in theme and image. With its shifts in consciousness, its rich allusion, and its play with language, it is a difficult but rewarding celebration of life. Finnegans Wake seems at times to present the dreams of a Dublin publican, at times to represent a universal consciousness. Less read, it is not well understood.

The Joyce canon includes three volumes of poems, Chamber Music (1907), Pomes Penyeach (1927), and Collected Poems (1937); the Ibsenesque play Exiles (1918); and Stephen Hero (1944), a fragmentary draft of A Portrait...