Irish novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in such works as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). During his career Joyce suffered from rejections from publishers, suppression by censors, attacks by critics, and misunderstanding by readers. From 1902 Joyce led a nomadic life, which perhaps reflected in his interest in the character of Odysseus. Although he spent long times in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zürich, with only occasional brief visit to Ireland, his native country remained basic to all his writings.

"But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad." (from Dubliners by James Joyce, Grant Richards Ltd, 1914, p. 28)

James Joyce was born in Dublin. His father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was 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 ten years younger than her husband. She was an accomplished pianist, whose life was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church and her husband. In spite of the poverty, the family struggled to maintain solid middle-class facade. According to Joyce, his father had been a "a conqueror of women" as a young man and had contracted syphilis. It had been argued that inherited syphilis led to Joyce's near blindnessness in his later years.

From the age of six Joyce, was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College, at Clane, and then at Belvedere College in Dublin (1893-97). Later the author thanked Jesuits for teaching him to think straight, although he rejected their religious instructions. As one of his exercises in Latin, he translated Horace's 'O fons Bandusiae' into English. "The pages of his timeworn Horace never felt cold to the touch even when his fingers were cold: they were human pages," Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, mused. (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, W. B. Huebsch, 1916, p. 291) Once Joyce broke his glasses and was unable to do his lessons. This episode was recounted also in the book.

In 1898 Joyce entered the University College, Dublin, where he found his early inspirations from the works of Henrik Ibsen, St.Thomas Aquinas and W.B. Yeats. Joyce's first publication was an essay on Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken. It appeared in Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time he began writing lyric poems. As a linguistic exercise, Joyce translated Gerhart Hauptmann's play Vor Sonnenaufgang, sent the translation to William Butler Yeats to be performed in Dublin. Yeats rejected the play, saying "you are not a very good German scholar.  . . . Nor do I think it very likely we could attempt German work at present." ('Hauptmann, Gerhart J. R. (1862-1946),' James Joyce A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work by A. Nicholas Fargnoli & Michael Patrick Gillespie, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 101)

After graduation in 1902, the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, teacher and in other occupations in difficult financial conditions. He spent in France a year, returning when a telegram arrived saying his mother was dying. Not long after her death, Joyce was traveling again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid (they married in 1931), staying in Pola, Austria-Hungary, and in Trieste, which was the world’s seventh busiest port. Joyce gave English lessons and talked about setting up an agency to sell Irish tweed. Refused a post teaching Italian literature in Dublin, he continued to live abroad.

The Trieste years were nomadic, poverty-stricken, and productive. Joyce and Nora loved this cosmopolitan port city at the head of the Adriatic Sea, where they lived in a number of different addresses.

A great admirer of the Danish critic Georg Brandes, Joyce quoted Brandes' monumental work William Shakespeare in his lectures on Hamlet at the Universitá Popolare in 1912-13. None of the twelve lectures have survived. The English translation of Brandes' book first apprared in 1898; Joyce had a copy of it in his own library. Later the study served as one of the main sources for "Scylla and Charybdis" episode in Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus presents his Shakespeare theory. 

During this period Joyce wrote most of Dubliners (1914), all of A Portrait of the Artist, the play, Exiles (1918), and large sections of Ulysses. Several of Joyce's siblings joined them, and two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born. The children grew up speakin the Trieste dialect of Italian. Joyce and Nora stayed together althoug Joyce fell in love with Anny Schleimer, the daughter of an Austrian banker, and Roberto Prezioso, the editor of the newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera, tried to seduce Nora. After a short stint in Rome in 1906-07 as a bank clerk ended in illness, Joyce returned to Trieste.

In 1907 Joyce published a collection of poems, Chamber Music. The title was suggested, as the author later stated, by the sound of urine tinkling into a prostitute's chamber pot. The poems have with their open vowels and repetitions such musical quality that many of them have been made into songs. "I have left my book, / I have left my room, / For I heard you singing / Through the gloom." (Ibid., Elkin Mathews, 1907, n. p.) Joyce himself had a fine tenor voice; he liked opera and bel canto.

In 1909 Joyce opened a cinema in Dublin, but this affair failed and he was soon back in Trieste, still broke and working as a teacher, tweed salesman, journalist and lecturer. In 1912 he was in Ireland, trying to persuade Maunsel & Co to fulfill their contract to publish Dubliners. The work contained a series of short stories, dealing with the lives of ordinary people, youth, adolescence, young adulthood, and maturity. The last story, 'The Dead', was adapted into screen by John Huston in 1987.

It was Joyce's last journey to his home country. However, he had became friends with Ezra Pound, who began to market his works. A Portrait of the Artist apparently began as a quasi-biographical memoir entitled Stephen Hero between 1904 and 1906. Only a fragment of the original manuscript has survived. The book follows the life of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, from childhood towards maturity, his education at University College, Dublin, and rebellion to free himself from the claims of family and Irish nationalism. Stephen takes religion seriously, and considers entering a seminary, but then also rejects Roman Catholicism. "— Look here, Cranly — he said. — You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning. —" (Ibid., p. 291) At the end Stephen resolves to leave Ireland for Paris to encounter "the reality of experience". He wants to establish himself as a writer.

Brandes never reviewed Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist, which the publisher sent to him. With the publication of Ulysses, he was also among the receivers of free copies.

At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich, where Lenin and the poet essayist Tristan Tzara had found their refuge. Joyce's WW I years with the legendary Russian revolutionary and Tzara, who founded the dadaist movement at the Cabaret Voltaire, provide the basis for Tom Stoppard's play Travesties (1974).

In Zürich Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, which was first published in France, because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available 1933. The theme of jealousy was based partly on a story a former friend of Joyce told: he claimed that he had been sexually intimate with the author's wife, Nora, even while Joyce was courting her. Ulysses takes place on one day in Dublin (Thursday, 16th of June, 1904) and reflected the classic work of Homer (fl. 9th or 8th century BC?). Ulysses has often been called a literary Baedeker, by which a trip to Dublin becomes enlived. "I want," said Joyce to a friend, "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's Odyssey: A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses by Frank Delaney, Granada, 1983, p. 10)

The main characters are Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, the hero from A Portrait of the Artist. They are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope. Barmaids are the famous Sirens. One of the models for Bloom was Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo), a novelist and businessman who was Joyce's student at the Berlitz school in Trieste. The story, using stream-of-consciousness technique, parallel the major events in Odysseus' journey home. However, Bloom's adventures are less heroic and his homecoming is less violent. Bloom makes his trip to the underworld by attending a funeral at Glasnevin Cemetary. "We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the fryingpan of life into the fire of purgatory." (Ibid., Published for the Egoist Press, London by John Bodker, Paris, 1922, p. 107) The paths of Stephen and Bloom cross and recross through the day. Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature. "Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t understand it," Jeremy Corbyn has said, advising to read a little bit at a time and think about it and then move on. ('Jeremy Corbyn on Joyce's Ulysses: ‘Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t understand it' by Peter Carty, The Guardian, Fri 14 Jun 2019)

From 1917 to 1930 Joyce endured several eye operations, being totally blind for short intervals. (According to tradition, Homer was also blind.) Probably following the recommendation of T.S. Eliot, who had stayed at the Rue de l'Université (now Hötel Lenox) when he was studying at the Sorbonne, Pound booked rooms in this hotel for Joyce and his family. They ended up using it three different times and spending the next twenty years in Paris. From 1925 to 1930 they lived in an apartment on the Square de Robiac, longer than anywhere else in Paris.

In March 1923 Joyce began 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. Wake occupied Joyce's time for the next sixteen years – its final version was completed late in 1938. Occasionally he gave readings from his new material. A copy of the novel was present at Joyce's birthday celebration on February 1939.

Joyce's daughter Lucia, born in Trieste in 1907, became Carl Jung's patient in 1934. In her teens, she studied dance, and later The Paris Times praised her skills as choreocrapher, linguist, and performer. With her father she collaborated in Pomes Penyeach (1927), for which she did some illustrations. Lucia's great love was Samuel Beckett, who was not interested in her. In the 1930s, she started to behave erratically. At the Burghölz psychiatric clinic in Zürich, where Jung worked, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. Joyce was left bitter at Jung's analysis of his daughter – Jung thought she was too close with her father's psychic system. In revenge, Joyce played in Finnegans Wake with Jung's concepts of Animus and Anima. Lucia died in a mental hospital in Northampton, England, in 1982.

After the fall of France in WWII, Joyce returned to Zürich, where he was taken ill. He was diagnosed of having a perforated duodenal ulcer. Joyce died after an operation, on January 13, 1941, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake, published on 4 May, 1939, by Faber and Faber. His supposed last words were: "Does nobody understand?" (Last Words of Notable People: Final Words of More Than 3500 Noteworthy People Through History, compiled by William B. Brahms, Reference Desk Press, 2010, p. 349) When Joyce was buried in Zürich at Fluntern cemetery in was cold and snowing. Only a few people was there.

Finnegans Wake was the last and most revolutionary work of the author, partly based on Freud's dream psychology, Bruno's theory of the complementary but conflicting nature of opposites, and the cyclic theory of history of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). There is not much plot or characters to speak of – the life of all human experience is viewed as fragmentary. Some critics considered the work masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. "The demand that I make of my reader," Joyce said to the American writer Max Eastman, "is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." (The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, second edition, edited by Peter Kemp, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 11) When someone asked Joyce why the book was written in a very difficult style, Joyce replied: "To keep the critics busy for three hundred years."(James Joyce by Richard Ellman, Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 716)

The novel presents the nocturnal dream world of H. C. Earwicker (Here Comes Everywhere) and his family, the wife and mother Anna Livia Plurabelle, the twins Shem and Shaun, and the daughter Issy, but who is the dreamer, or who are the dreamers, is a puzzle.

"Hay, hay, hay! Hoq, hoq, hoq! Faun and Flora on the lea love that little old joq. To anyone who knew and loved the christlikeness of the big cleanminded giant H. C. Earwicker throughout his excellency long vicefreegal existence the mere suggestion of him as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a boobytrap rings particularly preposterous." (Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber, 1939, p. 33) In the frame of the minimal central story Joyce experiments with language, combines puns and foreign words with allusions to history, psychology and religion, and the whole universe. The characters turn up in hundreds of different forms. Transformations are as sudden and flexible as in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The last word in the book is "the", which leads to the opening word in the book, "riverrun": "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Envirtons." (Ibid., p. 3)

Although the events are set in Dublin, the place is an analogy for everywhere else. The title of the book is a compound of Finn MaCool, the Irish folk-hero who is supposed to return to life at some future date to become the savior of Ireland, and Tim Finnegan, the hero of music-hall ballad, who sprang to life in the middle of his own wake.

For further reading: James Joyce by Herbert Gorman (1939); Introducing James Joyce, edited by T.S. Eliot (1942); Stephen Hero, edited by Theodore Spencer (1944); James Joyce by W.Y. Tindall (1950); Joyce: The Man, the Reputation, the Work by Marvin Maglaner and Richard M. Kain (1956); Dublin's Joyce by Hugh Kenner (1956); My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years by Stanislaus Joyce (1958); James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (1959); A Readers' Guide to Joyce by William York Tindall (1959); The Art of James Joyce by A.Walton Litz (1961); Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce's Ulysses by Robert M. Adams (1962); Joyce - Again's Wake: An Analysis of Finnegan's Wake by Bernard Benstock (1965); James Joyce's 'Ulysses': Critical Essays, edited by Clive Hart and David Hayman (1974); A Conceptual Guide to 'Finnegans Wake' by Michael H. Begnal and Fritz Senn (1974); James Joyce: the Citizen and the Artist by Charles Peake (1977); James Joyce by Patrick Parrinder (1984); Joyce's Anatomy of Culture by Cheryl Herr (1986); Joyce's Book of the Dark: 'Finnegans Wake by John Bishop (1986); Reauthorizing Joyce by Vicki Mahaffey (1988); 'Ulysses' Annotated by Don Gifford (1988); An Annotated Critical Bibliography of James Joyce, edited by Thomas F. Staley (1989); The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge (1990); Joyce's Web by Margot Norris (1992); James Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' by David Seed (1992); Critical Essays on James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, edited by Patrick A. McCarthy (1992); James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare by Robert E. Spoo (1994); Gender in Joyce, edited by Jolanta W. Wawrzycka (1997); A Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses, edited by Margot Norris (1999); Toiseen maailmaan. James Joycen novelli "Kuolleet" kirjallisuustieteen kohteena by Pekka Vartiainen (1999); The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920 by John McCourt (2000); Joyce's "Ulysses" for Everyone, Or How To Skip Reading It the First Time by John Mood (2004); James Joyce: A New Biography by Gordon Bowker (2012); 'Hamlet… Shakespeare. Brandes… Joyce' by Benjamin Boysen, in Shakespearean Joyce - Joycean Shakespeare, edited bt John McCourt (2016); New Joyce Studies, edited by Catherine Flynn (2022); Timeless Joyce: A Hundred Years of Ulysses by Asun López-Varela Azcárate (2023); James Joyce and the Irish revolution: The Easter Rising as Modern Event by Luke Gibbons (2023)   

Selected works:

• Chamber Music, 1907
  - Kamarimusiikkia (suom. Ville-Juhani Sutinen, 2012)
• Dubliners, 1914
  - Kuollut: kaksi novellia kokoelmasta Dubliners (suom. Jorma Etto, 1957) / Dublinilaisia (suom. Pentti Saarikoski, 1965) / Dublinilaisia (suom. Heikki Salojärvi, 2012)
  - films: A Painful Case, 1984, prod. Channel 4 Television Corporation (Ireland), dir. John Lynch; The Dead, 1987 (based on the last story in the collection) dir. by John Huston, starring Anjelica Huston, Donal McCann, Dan O'Herlihy, Donal Donnelly; The Dead, 2004, prod. PIB Productions, dir. Prince Bagdasarian, screenplay Celin Cuadra
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916
  - Taiteilijan omakuva nuoruuden vuosilta: romaani (suom. Alex Matson, 1946)
  - film 1979, dir. by Joseph Strick, starring Bosco Hogan, T.P. McKenna, John Gielgud
• Exiles, 1918
• Ulysses, 1922
  - Odysseus (suom.  Pentti Saarikoski, 1964) / Ulysses (suom. Leevi Lehto, 2012)
  - films: 1967, dir. Joseph Strick, starring Barbara Jefford, Molo O'Shea, Maurive Roeves, T.P. McKenna; Uliisses, 1982, prod. Werner Nekes Filmproduktion (West Germany), dir. Werner Nekes, starring Armin Wölfl, Tabea Blumenschein, Russel Derson, Shezad Abbas; Bloom, 2003, prod. Odyssey Pictures (Ireland), dir. Sean Walsh, starring Stephen Rea, Angeline Ball, Hugh O'Conor, Neilí Conroy
• Pomes Penyeach, 1927
  - Runoja pennin kappale (suom. Ville-Juhani Sutinen, 2012)
  
• Collected Poems, 1936
• Finnegans Wake, 1939
  - films: 1965, prod. Expanding Cinema, dir. Mary Ellen Bute, starring Martin J. Kelley, Jane Reilly, Peter Haskell, Page Johnson, John V. Kelleher; The Wake, 2000, prod. Wake Film (Denmark), dir. Michael Kvium, Christian Lemmerz
• Stephen Hero, 1944
• The Portable James Joyce, 1947 (edited by Harry Levin)
• The Essential James Joyce, 1948 (edited  with an introduction and notes by Harry Levin)
• The Letters of James Joyce, 1957-66 (3 vols., edited by  Stuart Gilbert, Richard Ellmann)
• The Critical Writings of James Joyce, 1959 (edited by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellman)
• Anna Livia Prulabelle: The Making of a Chapter, 1960 (edited by Fred H. Higginson)
• A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, 1963 (edited by David Hayman)
• Giacomo Joyce, 1968 (with introduction and notes by Richard Ellmann)
• Selected Letters of James Joyce, 1975 (edited by Richard Ellmann)
  - Pyhä, rivo rakkaus: Kirjeitä Noralle (valikoima; suom. Ville-Juhani Sutinen, 2012); Kirjeitä taiteilijatovereille (valikoima; suom. Ville-Juhani Sutinen, 2013)
  
• The James Joyce Archives, 1977-80 (63 vols.)
• The Early Joyce: The Book Reviews, 1902-1903, 1977 (edited with an introduction by Stanislaus Joyce and Ellsworth Mason)
• Epiphanies, 1978 (with introduction and notes by O. Silverman)
• James Joyce's Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921-1940, 1987 (edited by Melisa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman)
• Ulysses: A Reader's Edition, 1997 (edited by Danis Rose)
• The Cats of Copenhagen, 2012 (illustrated by Casey Sorrow)
• The Ondt and the Gracehoper, 2014 (llustrated by Thomas McNally) 
  
• Exiles: a Critical Edition, 2016 (edited by A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie; foreword by Sebastian D.G. Knowles)
  
• Ulysses: the 1922 Text, 2022 (edited with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson)
  
• Collected Epiphanies of James Joyce: A Critical Edition, 2024 (edited by Sangam MacDuff, Angus McFadzean, Morris Beja)