“The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
BY Jenna Sule
James Joyce lived an interesting life filled with art and adventure. However, his early life started rather tame. Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, the oldest of ten children. His father was a singer but due to poor choice with drink, the family’s finances fell which pushed them further into poverty. Despite growing up destitute, Joyce had a natural gift for literature, which caused his family to push for him to get an education. He went to various Irish schools where he obtained degrees in art and modern language. According to The James Joyce Centre, he also learned around 17 languages including Arabic and Greek.
by Jacques-Emile Blanche
In 1904, Joyce started releasing his stories in various Irish magazines and journals. This was just the start of a series of stories written by Joyce. It was only three years later that he started writing his most famous work, Ulysses. Apparently, the success of his other works encouraged him to write the novel.
Among Joyce’s early works is a collection of short stories, Dubliners, published in 1914. He also released , A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Exiles (1918), Pomes Penyeach (1927), and Finnegans Wake (1939).
During WW1, Joyce and his family moved to Zurich, where he worked on Ulysses. Towards the end of his life, in 1940, Joyce made it to the south of France. It is thanks to Paul Léon, his close friend, that we have a lot of Joyce’s manuscripts because he went back to Joyce’s apartment in Paris to protect the family’s personal belongings. Unfortunately, it was only a year later that Joyce died in Zurich (where he had been given asylum with his family) on January 13, 1941 at the age of 58. He is now resting in Fluntern Cemetery, Zurich.
The Deadline 