"I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book." -James Joyce

James Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin, Ireland. The family was impoverished, but tried to keep up a middle-class facade. Joyce attended prestigious schools and then the Royal University (University College) in Dublin. Raised in the Roman Catholic faith, he broke with the church while he was in college. After graduation he moved to Paris, initially to study medicine, but instead enjoyed the good life and went into debt. He returned to Ireland when his mother became ill and the family fell on hard times.

Joyce made money reviewing books and teaching school. In 1904 he began writing a book titled Stephen Hero that would later become Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Later that same year, Joyce met Nora Barnacle and the two moved to Europe. They and their two children lived in Trieste, Italy, in Paris, and in Zürich, Switzerland, meagerly supported by Joyce's jobs as a language instructor and by gifts from patrons. In 1906 Joyce wrote the story "The Dead," and developed the idea for Ulysses. In 1907 he suffered the first of the severe eye troubles that led to near blindness. Beginning in 1914, Joyce gained greater attention for his writing. Several wealthy patrons discovered his work and the poet Ezra Pound recognized Joyce's unique talent.

Ulysses was published in 1922 and subsequently banned, making Joyce famous. Joyce and Nora enjoyed a lavish lifestyle in Paris during the 1920's and 1930's, marrying in 1931. The years 1922 to 1939 were spent writing Finnegans Wake.  An often overlooked fact about Joyce is that he had an excellent singing voice and entered singing contests as a young man. (Nora actually encouraged him to become a singer instead of a writer.) James Joyce died unexpectedly in 1941 in Zurich.

(Biographical information provided by http://www.bloomsdaysandiego.com/)