Irish novelist James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882 in Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland to a family sunk in debt and poverty. He was taken out of his school when he was 10 due to a lack of funds. He joined Belvedere College a year later when a Jesuit priest named John Conmee waived the tuition fee for him and his brother Stanislaus. Joyce displayed his talent for writing by winning first place for English composition in his final years here. He graduated in 1898.
Joyce is known for his stream-of-consciousness style of writing, his experimental use of language and breaking with the typical constructs of a novel. His masterpiece ‘Ulysses’ is a dense satire told in the style of interior monologues, dialogues and soliloquy. The novel is framed within the space of a day and contains 18 episodes.
He wrote a collection of short stories called ‘Dubliners’ in 1914 and a coming-of-age novel called ‘A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ which was published in 1916. His last novel, ‘Finnegans Wake’, published in 1939, was a language experiment that pushed every known construct of a novel, including use of punctuation, linearity and reasoning.
Joyce died of a perforated duodenal ulcer in Zurich in 1941. He is widely regarded as one of the most ground-breaking writers of the 20th century.
Picture Credit : Google
