His stories are fillled with the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.
James Joyce (1882-1941) was born and educated in Dublin. Although he spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and fictional universe is firmly rooted in his native Dublin, the city which provides the settings and much of the subject matter for all his fiction. He is best known for his landmark novel
Ulysses (1922) and its controversial successor
Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection
Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).