James Joyce was the Irish writer whose radical experiments with language and narrative made him one of the most influential novelists in the history of literature. Born in Dublin into a once-comfortable family ruined by his father's drinking and improvidence, he was educated by the Jesuits and at University College Dublin before leaving Ireland in 1904 to spend his life in self-imposed exile in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris.
Though he lived abroad for nearly four decades, Dublin remained the subject and setting of almost everything he wrote. His luminous short-story collection Dubliners (1914) and the autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) established his gifts. His masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), retells Homer's Odyssey across a single ordinary day in Dublin, pioneering the interior-monologue or "stream of consciousness" technique and stretching the resources of prose to their limit.
Ulysses was banned as obscene in Britain and the United States for years, its publication a landmark in the fight against literary censorship; it is now widely regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written.
His final, even more daring work, Finnegans Wake (1939), was composed over seventeen years in a dense, multilingual dream-language that few readers have fully fathomed. Plagued throughout his life by poverty, family troubles, and progressive blindness, Joyce died in Zurich in 1941, his reputation as a revolutionary of modern literature already secure.