James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
- Born
- 1882-02-02 12:00:00
- Died
- 1941-01-13 12:00:00
- Gender
- Male
- Place of migration
- Migrated to/Born elsewhere
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882 – 1941) was one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. He is best known for Ulysses (1922), Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). He also wrote three books of poetry, a play, and journalistic articles. He is commemorated each year in Ireland with the Bloomsday Celebrations where people take to the streets of Dublin to retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom, the main character of Ulysses.
Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family from Fermoy, Co. Cork. His paternal grandfather, James Augustine Joyce (1827-1866) of Fermoy married Ellen O'Connell (1816-1881) daughter of John O'Connell, a Cork Alderman who owned a drapery business and other properties in Cork City. Seán Mór Seoighe (fl. 1680) a stonemason from Connemara was his purported Joyce ancestor. Ellen O'Connell's family claimed kinship with "The Liberator" Daniel O'Connell.
In 1887, his father John Stanislaus Joyce left Cork for a job with Dublin Corporation; and the family settled in the seaside town of Bray, just south of Dublin. By 1893, John Joyce, a bankrupt, was dismissed with a pension, and thus began the family's slide into poverty. By 1901 the family were living at Royal Terrace (now Inverness Road), in Clontarf, just north of Dublin City.
In 1902, young James Joyce, educated by the Jesuits, graduated from UCD having studied English, French and Italian. After that, he left for Paris to study medicine but gave up on that after 4 months, returning to Dublin as his mother was dying. Shortly after this he met Galway woman Nora Barnacle and on 16 June 1904 they had their first date together. Later that year the couple moved to Zurich in Switzerland and settled in Trieste, (then part of Austria-Hungary) Italy for the best part of 10 years. Later that year Nora gave birth to their first child, and a daughter followed in 1907. In 1915, they moved to Zurich and on to Paris in 1920, returning frequently to Zurich for medical treatment.
Joyce died in Zurich on 13 January 1941 following surgery and was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery, Zurich.
