Born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, James Joyce was son to John and Mary Joyce. John Joyce was a boisterously amusing man with a volatile temper and a penchant for spending money. This fact coupled with his lack of a serious career saw the Joyce family move from a tenuous middle class existence to one of itinerant poverty. In 1894, when the young James was only 12 years of age, his father had no less than 10 surviving children, 11 mortgages and no property or income to speak of. Despite this however, James managed a meager Jesuit and Catholic education which saw him schooled in the classics and equipped him with a gift for acquiring languages and with a rigorous, scholarly mind; at the same time instilling in him an abiding passion for the pursuit of an Irish cultural nationalism. It was this love of all things Irish and his affinity for his home town of Dublin that saw him become an Irish national icon.
On June 16, 1904 – a day later rendered immortal by its placement as the date of the events of Ulysses – Joyce met Nora Barnacle. The two fell in love and eloped to the Continent where they lived for 6 months. Their marriage never received legal sanction and as a result their son, Giorgio (George) was considered illegitimate, a legal and moral dilemma which proved an ongoing and never fully resolved concern for Joyce.
Between 1909 and 1912 Joyce made several trips to Dublin which, while somewhat ill-fated in themselves, nevertheless provided him with much of the material for his future writings. In 1912, despite his abiding commitment to Irish nationalism, Joyce left Ireland, never again to return. In the war years of 1914 –1918 Joyce taught languages in Switzerland as he was medically unfit for military service. Following the war he returned to Paris where he lived a literary life plagued by ill health and a continuing public opposition to the controversial elements of his work.
Despite this opposition to his writings, and perhaps even in part because of it, Joyce has come to be widely known as one of the greatest stylists in the history of literature. His style of writing developed greatly over the years. His first major work The Dubliners (which he began writing in 1900 but did not publish until 1914), is rendered in a straightforward style which lends a quiet power to the sordid descriptions of Dublin's slums. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is the story of an intense young man torn between the expectations of his religious upbringing and his desire for a passionate life. The work is largely autobiographical with its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, providing a clear reflection of the young Joyce. The novel is frank in its subject matter, with Joyce's treatment of sexual conflict and confrontation raising the ire of many readers and critics.
Arguably Joyce's greatest achievement is found in Ulysses (1922). Modeled on Homer's Odyssey, the events of the novel take place on a single day, are once again located in the slums of Dublin, and see the return of Stephen Dedalus as a primary characters. The novel stresses the sordidness and poverty of the modern age and compares it harshly with the glory of the heroic age of Homer. The intimately vivid and personal accounts given by individual characters throughout the story saw the novel banned in Britain and America for its obscenity. Importantly Ulysses sees the advancement of Joyce's writing technique known as ‘stream of consciousness', where the internal monologue of the piece develops in a naturalistic style, drawing little distinction between fiction and reality.
Joyce's final novel was Finnegan's Wake(1939). In this work Joyce has developed his stream of consciousness technique to such an extreme that passages of the book seem to become all but incomprehensible, holding little meaning to any than (presumably) the author. The novel concerns itself with a study of the human race through a series of dreamscapes which while adding to the confusion, cannot deter from the power and verbal richness of the work.
In his latter years Joyce battled Glaucoma and withstood great family tragedy, including his daughter being diagnosed with Schizophrenia. He died following surgery for a perforated stomach ulcer in Zurich on January 13, 1941. He remains the widely acclaimed father of Modernist literature.