James Joyce (1882-1941) first saw his name on a published piece soon after his eighteenth birthday and this confirmed his intention to be a writer. He graduated from University College, Dublin, in 1902 and soon left for Paris. Joyce was to spend most of his life in Europe, a self-determined exile from his native Ireland. Though he was quick to condemn Irish society as narrow and constricted, his fiction was securely anchored in contemporary Irish culture and society, and he has been celebrated as one of Ireland’s greatest authors. Joyce spent much of his life before the outbreak of First World War in the Austrian/Italian seaport of Trieste. Here he settled in with his companion (and later wife) Nora Barnacle, had two children, and wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (published in 1916 in the United States). With the outbreak of war, Joyce and his family were allowed to move to Switzerland, where he began work on the novel that would be published as Ulysses.

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