James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882 – 1941) was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, a suburb south of Dublin. Joyce’s father was John Stanislaus Joyce and his mother was Mary Jane “May” (née Murray). He was the eldest of ten surviving children. He attended school in Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College before going on to University College where he studied modern languages.

After graduating from university, Joyce went to Paris, ostensibly to study medicine, and was recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the illness and subsequent death of his mother. He stayed in Ireland until 1904. In June of that year, he met Nora Barnacle, the Galway woman who was to become his partner and later his wife. Their first date was on 16 June 1904, a date that Joyce would memorialise as the setting of Ulysses and is now popularly known as “Bloomsday”.

In August 1904, the first of Joyce’s short stories was published in the Irish Homestead magazine, followed by two others. Shortly afterwards though Joyce and Nora left Ireland into self-imposed exile Through various teaching positions, they settled in Trieste France, via Paris, Zurich and Pola. After he left Ireland in 1904, Joyce only made four return visits, the last of those in 1912, after which he never returned to Ireland.

1914 proved a crucial year for Joyce. With Ezra Pound’s assistance, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s first novel, began to appear in serial form in Harriet Weaver’s Egoist magazine in London. His collection of short stories, Dubliners, on which he had been working since 1904, was finally published, and he also wrote his only play, Exiles.

With the start of the First World War, Joyce and Nora, along with their two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were forced to leave Trieste and arrived in Zürich where they lived for the duration of the war. It was during this time that Joyce worked on Ulysses and included many characteristics of those around him in the characters of the book.

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 of 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.

Long before Ulysses ever came out, debate raged over the content of the novel. Parts of the story had appeared in publications in the United States and the United Kingdom, the book was banned for several years after it was published in France. In the United States, 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.

Still, the book found its way into the hands of eager American and British readers, who managed to get hold of bootlegged copies of the novel. In the United States, the ban came to a head in 1932 when in New York City Customs Agents seized copies of the book that had been sent to Random House Publishers. In 1934, Judge John M. Woolsey declared that Ulysses was not pornographic.

In 1940, Joyce fled to the south of France ahead of the Nazi invasion, and then to Schwesterhaus vom Roten Kreuz in Zurich where he and his family were given asylum. Following an intestinal operation, James Joyce died on 13 January 1941 at the age of 58 in He is buried in Fluntern Cemetery, Zurich.