James Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

one
of the most influential writers in the modernist
avant-garde of the early 20th century.

His complete oeuvre also includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.

to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane "May" Murray in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar.

He was baptised in the nearby
St. Joseph's Church in Terenure
on 5 February by Rev. John O'Mulloy.

He was the eldest of ten surviving children; two of his siblings died of typhoid.

near Clane in 1888 but had to leave in 1892 when his father
could no longer pay the fees.

On 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Connemara, who was working as a chambermaid. They first stepped out together, an event which would be commemorated by providing the date for the action of Ulysses.

where he had supposedly acquired a post to teach English at the Berlitz Language School through an agent in England.

Joyce's statue in Trieste 

 It turned out that the English agent had been swindled, but the director of the school sent him on to Trieste

Trieste for World War I, he moved to Zurich.

The so-called James-Joyce-Kanzel
(plateau) at the confluence of the Sihl
and Limmat rivers in Zurich where
Joyce loved to relax 

There, he met one of his most enduring and important friends, Frank Budgen, whose opinion Joyce constantly sought through the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Ezra Pound, supposedly for a week, but he ended up living there for the next twenty years.

On 11 January 1941, he underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer. The following day he fell into a coma. He awoke at 2 a.m. on 13 January 1941, and asked for a nurse to call his wife and son before losing consciousness again. They were still on their way when he died 15 minutes later.

and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of its subject matter.

Major works

As he was completing work on Dubliners in 1906, Joyce considered adding another story featuring a Jewish advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom under the title Ulysses.