James Joyce

James Joyce left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle and never lived there again, writing about nothing else from Trieste, Zurich and Paris. Dubliners is fifteen stories of the city’s paralysis; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus out of Ireland’s nets; Ulysses, one day in June 1904 told in a different style for each hour, was banned in Britain and America for a decade and is the novel of the twentieth century on most lists. Finnegans Wake took the last seventeen years of his life. He was nearly blind and always short of money.