James Joyce

James Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish writer, born in Dublin, the eldest of ten surviving children of an improvident father, and educated by the Jesuits. In 1904 he left Ireland with Nora Barnacle and spent the rest of his life in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, teaching English and living on patrons while he wrote about the city he had left: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses (1922), banned in Britain and the United States for a decade, and Finnegans Wake, seventeen years in the making. He was nearly blind for much of his later life and died in Zurich after an operation.