James Joyce: Author(1882–1941)

James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882 in Dublin, Ireland. He published "Portrait of the Artist" in 1916 and caught the attention of Ezra Pound. With "Ulysses," Joyce perfected his stream-of-consciousness style and became a literary celebrity. The explicit content of his prose brought about landmark legal decisions on obscenity. Joyce battled eye ailments for most of his life. He died in 1941.

His exploration of language and new literary forms showed not only his genius as a writer but spawned a fresh approach for novelists, one that drew heavily on Joyce's love of the stream-of-consciousness technique and the examination of big events through small happenings in everyday lives.

From an early age, James Joyce showed not only exceeding intelligence but also a gift for writing and a passion for literature. He taught himself Norwegian so he could read Henrik Ibsen's plays in the language they'd been written, and spent his free time devouring Dante, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas.

In 1914 he published his first book, Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories. Two years later Joyce put out a second book, the novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
While not a huge commercial success, the book caught the attention of the American poet, Ezra Pound, who praised Joyce for his unconventional style and voice.
The same year that the Dubliners came out, Joyce embarked on what would prove to be his landmark novel: Ulysses. The story recounts a single day in Dublin. The date: June 16, 1904, the same day that Joyce and Barnacle met. On the surface, the novel follows the story three central characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly Bloom, as well as the city life that unfolds around them. But Ulysses is also a modern retelling of Homer's Odyssey, with the three main characters serving as modern versions of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope.
With its advanced use of interior monologue, the novel not only brought the reader deep into Bloom's sometimes lurid mind, but pioneered Joyce's use of stream of consciousnesses as a literary technique and set the course for a whole new kind of novel. But Ulysses is not an easy read, and upon its publication in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, an American expat who owned a bookstore in the city, the book drew both praise and sharp criticism.

Long before Ulysses ever came out, debate raged over the content of the novel. Parts of the story had appeared in English and American publications and in the US and the UK the book was banned for several years after it was published in France. In the US, Ulysses's supposed obscenity prompted the Post Office to confiscate issues of the magazine that had published Joyce's work. Fines were levied against the editors, and a censorship battle was waged that only further hyped the novel.

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