Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius 1882-1941
Irish writer and poet

James Joyce was born in Dublin, which despite his long exile provides the setting for most of his work. He was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, and then at University College, Dublin, where he studied modern languages. A capable linguist and voracious reader, he corresponded with Henrik Ibsen. Among other influences were Dante, George Moore and W B Yeats.

He rejected Catholicism, and in 1902 went to Paris for a year, living in poverty and writing poetry. His mother's death prompted his return to Ireland, when he stayed briefly in the Martello Tower which features in the early part of Ulysses; he then left Ireland with Nora Barnacle, who was to be his companion for the rest of his life. He taught English for a spell in Trieste and Rome, and had two children, but he had to scrounge to make ends meet.

After a war spent mainly in Switzerland the couple settled in Paris. By now Joyce was the author of two books: Chamber Music (1907) and Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories that includes among other celebrated items, 'The Dead'. The stories were greeted enthusiastically, and Joyce was championed by Ezra Pound and by Harriet Shaw Weaver, editor of The Egoist, in which the autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared in instalments (1914-15). The support of friends, and of his brother Stanislaus, also did much to mitigate the difficulties of these years. Petitioned by Yeats and Pound on his behalf, the Royal Literary Fund in 1915 made him a grant and shortly afterwards the civil list followed suit. But his health was failing, his eyesight deteriorating and he was deeply disturbed by his daughter Lucia's mental illness.

In 1922 his seminal novel, Ulysses, was published in Paris on 2 February. Its explicit stream-of-consciousness description of the thoughts and happenings of everyday life immediately provoked violent reactions, and it was not published in the UK until 1936. But the story of Leopold Bloom's day-long perambulation through Dublin is now regarded as a major advance for fiction. Meanwhile Joyce and Nora Barnacle were married during a trip to London in 1931. Lucia was diagnosed as schizophrenic the following year. Although troubled by worsening glaucoma, Joyce supervised the publication of Finnegans Wake, which moved on from the consciousness of Ulysses to the semi-consciousness of a dream-world, in 1939. On the outbreak of World War II he returned to Zurich, where he underwent an operation for a duodenal ulcer, but he failed to recover.

Much critical energy has been spent trying to analyse Joyce's work, but readers continue to delight in his word play, comedy and irrepressible power of invention. He exercised a major influence on his contmporaries, especially Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, and on later generations of writers, among whom Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike and Anthony Burgess have acknowledged their debt.

Bibliography: Joyce's letters have been published by S Gilbert, The Letters of James Joyce (vol 1, 1957) and by R Ellmann (vols 2 and 3, 1966); see also R Ellmann, James Joyce (2nd edn, 1982); A Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1975).