Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “James Joyce” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

James Joyce

(1882 -1941)

James Joyce, Irish novelist, was noted for his experimental use of language in works such as Ulysses (1922) and Finneganns Wake (1939). Joyce’s technical innovations in the art of the novel in-clude an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns and allusions. James Joyce was born in Dublin, on February 2, 1882, as the son of John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman, who had failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of professions, including politics and tax collecting. Joyce’s mother, Mary Jane Murray was an accomplished pianist, whose life was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. In spite of their poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class facade. From the age of six Joyce was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College, at Chine, and then at Belvedere College in Dublin (1893-97). In 1898 he entered the University College, Dublin. Joyce’s first publication was an essay on Ibsen’s plays When We Dead Awaken. It appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time he also began writing lyric poems. After graduation in 1902 the twenty-near-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, teacher and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a ,ear in France, returning when a telegram arrived saving his mother was dying. Not long after her death, Joyce was travelling again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid who he married in 1931.

Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exilesin 1918 and Ulysses in 1922. In 1907 Joyce had published a collection of poems, Chamber Music. At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zurich. In Zurich Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, which was first published in France because of censor-ship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available only in 1933. In March 1923 Joyce started in Paris his second major work, Finnegans Wake, suffering at the same time chronic eye troubles caused by ‘glaucoma. The first segment of the novel appeared in Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review in April 1924, as part of what Joyce called Work in Progress. The final version was published in 1939.  Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. After the fall of France in World War II, Joyce returned to Zurich, where he died on January 13, 1941, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake.