In 1914, Joyce published The Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories. In its representation of what one character calls “Dear dirty Dublin,” the book is not only a picture of the city of Joyce’s youth, it is also an illustration of the contrary impulses of the exiled artist. Joyce left Dublin in 1904, frustrated with the oppressive twin forces of religion and politics that paralyzed the soul of the city.
ABOUT JAMES JOYCE
James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in a suburb of Dublin. He was one of twelve children raised in poverty by a father who wasted the family fortunes and a mother who died at the age of forty-four. At the age of six, Joyce was sent to a Jesuit boarding school. In 1902, he graduated from University College in Dublin, where he studied foreign languages and philosophy.
Immediately after graduation, Joyce left Dublin to study medicine in Paris, but he returned to Ireland in 1903 to see his dying mother. In June 1904 he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and they moved to Trieste and then Zurich, where he taught languages at the Berlitz school. They had two children—Giorgio, born in 1905, and Lucia, born in 1907.
Joyce’s first major work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel published in serial form beginning in 1914, established his literary reputation. Joyce also published a collection of short stories, Dubliners, that same year, and began work on what many critics consider his crowning achievement, Ulysses, published in 1922. The novel, which loosely follows the structure of Homer’s Odyssey, traces one day in the lives of Stephen Dedalus, the hero of Portrait, and Leopold and Molly Bloom, a Dublin couple. In 1939, Joyce completed his last book, Finnegans Wake, a radical, extravagant experiment in language and narrative. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941 (from https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/321917/dubliners-by-james-joyce/9780140247749/readers-guide/)
English spoken 