James Joyce

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 into a Catholic family, the eldest of more than ten children. His father drank and squandered money, the family's fortunes declined, and they moved again and again to shabbier homes. He was educated by the Jesuits and studied modern languages at University College Dublin, teaching himself Norwegian to read Ibsen in the original. At twenty-two he left Ireland with Nora, a hotel chambermaid who later became his wife, and thereafter lived in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, earning a meagre living teaching English and suffering for years from severe eye disease that required more than a dozen operations. Almost all his work takes as its subject the Dublin he had left: 'If Dublin one day suddenly disappeared from the earth,' he said, 'it could be reconstructed out of my book.' His Ulysses is acknowledged as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century.