
Biography of James Joyce
James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. He attended Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, and he received a BA from the Royal University in Dublin.
In 1904 Joyce left Dublin with Nora Barnacle; the couple had two children and eventually married in 1931. From 1904 to 1905, they lived in Pola, Austria-Hungary, where Joyce published his first literary work, the satirical poem “The Holy Office.” They went on to live in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, returning to Ireland only rarely.
Joyce published his first book of poetry, Chamber Music (Elkin Matthews), in 1907. He is also the author of the poetry collection Pomes Penyeach (Shakespeare and Company, 1927). In 1936 The Black Sun Press published Joyce’s Collected Poems, which included the poems from his previous two collections alongside the poem “Ecce Puer,” written in 1932.
A review, sometimes attributed to T. S. Eliot, of Chamber Music in The Egoist reads, “Mr. Joyce is probably something of a musician; it is lyric verse, and good lyric verse is very rare. It will be called ‘fragile,’ but it is substantial, with a great deal of thought behind fine workmanship.”
Joyce is best known for his works of fiction, including Ulysses (Shakespeare and Company, 1922), the focus of several incendiary literary controversies; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (B. W. Huebsch, 1916); and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914). He also published Exiles: A Play in Three Acts (Grant Richards, 1918). Together, his works represent a major contribution to avant-garde modernism and to twentieth-century English literature.
Joyce suffered from a series of ocular illnesses, and he spent periods of his later life partially or totally blind. He died of complications from an intestinal surgery on January 13, 1941, in Zurich, Switzerland.
Short stories by James Joyce
Poems by James Joyce
- A Flower Given to My Daughter
- A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight
- A Prayer
- All day I hear the noise of waters
- Alone
- At That Hour
- Bahnhofstrasse
- Be Not Sad
- Because Your Voice Was at My Side
- Bid Adieu
- Bright Cap and Streamers
- Dear Heart
- Ecce Puer
- Flood
- From Dewy Dreams
- Gentle Lady, Do Not Sing
- Go Seek Her Out
- I Hear an Army
- I Would in That Sweet Bosom Be
- In the Dark Pine-Wood
- Lean Out of the Window
- Lightly Come or Lightly Go
- Love Came to Us
- My Dove, My Beautiful One
- My Love Is in a Light Attire
- Nightpiece
- Now, O Now in This Brown Land
- O Cool Is the Valley Now
- O Sweetheart, Hear You
- O, It Was Out by Donnycarney
- Of That So Sweet Imprisonment
- On the Beach at Fontana
- Rain Has Fallen All the Day
- She Weeps over Rahoon
- Silently She's Combing
- Simples
- Sleep Now, O Sleep Now
- Strings in the Earth and Air
- The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly
- The Twilight Turns
- This Heart That Flutters Near My Heart
- Thou Leanest to the Shell of Night
- Though I Thy Mithridates Were
- Tilly
- Tutto รจ Sciolto
- Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba
- What Counsel Has the Hooded Moon
- When the Star Goes Forth in Heaven
- Who Goes Amid the Green Wood
- Winds of May