James Joyce Quick Facts

James Joyce, a 20th century influential Irish writer.

 Profile

• Birth Name: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
• Date of Birth: February 2, 1882
• Place of Birth: 44 Brighton Square, Terenure, Dublin, Ireland
• Zodiac Sign: Aquarius
• Date of Death: January 13, 1941
• Place of Death: Zurich, Zurich District, Canton of Zurich, Switzerland
• Place of Burial: Fluntern Cemetery, Fluntern, Bezirk Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
• Cause of Death: Perforated duodenal ulcer
• Ethnicity: White
• Nationality: Irish
• Height: 5 ft 10 in

• Father: John Stanislaus Joyce (1849 -1931)
• Mother: Mary Jane (Murray) Joyce (1859-1903)
• Siblings:

1. Sister- Katie Joyce (c. 1875-?)
2. Sister-Elizabeth W Joyce (c. 1879-?)
3. Brother-John Augustine Joyce (c. 1881 - c. 1883)
4. Sister-Margaret Alice Joyce (c. 1884 - c. 1964)
5. Brother- John Stanislaw Joyce (1884-1955)
6. Sister- Mary Jane Joyce (c. 1886)
7. Brother - Charles Patrick Joyce (1886-?)
8. Brother- George Alfred Joyce (c. 1888 - 1902)
9. Sister- Mabel Josephine Anne Joyce (1893-?)
10. Sister -Eileen Isabella Joyce (1889-1963)
11. Sister- Eva May Joyce (1891)

• Sexual Orientation: Straight
• Spouse: Nora Barnacle (m. 1931) (1884 -1951)
• Children:

1. Son - Giorgio Joyce (1905 -1976)
2. Daughter- Lucia Anna Joyce (1907-1982)

• Alma Mater: Clongowes Wood College; Belvedere College; University College Dublin
• Known for: his experiments with language, symbolism, and perfecting the narrative techniques of interior monologue and stream of consciousness
• James Joyce was criticized for: complicating his writings through vague references or dull descriptions of intimate matters, including sexual activity.
• James Joyce was influenced by: William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ezra Pound, Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer, Gustave Flaubert, Dante Alighieri, Anton Chekhov, Jonathan Swift, Miguel de Cervantes, Aristotle, Henrik Ibsen, Stendhal, Lord Byron, John Milton, Laurence Sterne, François Rabelais, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung, Thomas Aquinas, George Moore, Edmund Spenser, Mikhail Lermontov, Robert Burns, Ben Jonson, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, Sheridan Le Fanu, John Henry Newman, Otto Weininger, and Jens Peter Jacobsen
• Joyce's Works Inspired:  James Blish, Anthony Burgess, Philip Dick, William Faulkner, Anthony Burgess, and Leonard Cohen

Quotes

“His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.” - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Major Works

• Dubliners (1914)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Exiles (1918)
• Ulysses (1922)
• Pomes Penyeach (1927)
• Finnegans Wake (1939)

Major Themes

• Psychology
• Exile
• Myth
• Catholicism

Did You Know?

• James Joyce was the eldest of 12 children born to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane (Murray) Joyce.
• His father had an unsuccessful career with involvement in several jobs including a position as tax collector for the city of Dublin.
• His mother was a gifted pianist.
• Joyce was educated entirely in Catholic schools in Ireland.
• James Joyce graduated in 1902 with a Pass degree in modern languages.
• Soon after his graduation, Joyce left Ireland to pursue a medical education in Paris.
• He returned to Ireland briefly in 1903 upon news of his mother's illness but left for Paris in 1904 after her death.
• In Paris, Joyce lived in near poverty even after the successful publication of Ulysses in 1922.
• Joyce's younger brother, Stanislaus Joyce provided him financial support throughout his life.
• Although Joyce and Nora started living together since1904, the couple finally got married in 1931 and the wedlock continued until Joyce's death.
• Joyce was plagued by severe eye problems for most of his adult life, which eventually led to near blindness. He underwent a multitude of surgeries for eye problems.
• Joyce's first published book was Chamber Music (1907), a collection of 36 love poems.
• His first prose work, Dubliners was published in 1914, which contained 15 short stories and sketches.
• Joyce's works left a profound impact on the Irish cinema, especially towards the development of the avant-garde film style.
• Joyce gained international recognition through the publication of Ulysses which many people consider one of the greatest and most original books ever written.
• Ulysses was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920.
• Ulysses was published as a complete book in Paris by Sylvia Beach, of the bookstore Shakespeare & Co. on 2 February 1922, Joyce's 40th birthday.
• Ulysses was banned in the United States from 1922 until 1933.

Media Gallery

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Quotations by Ted Hughes

TED HUGHES, A 20TH CENTURY ENGLISH WRITER OF POETRY, NON-FICTION AND CHILDREN'S BOOKS.

“You were overloaded. I said nothing.
I said nothing. The stone man made soup.
The burning woman drank it.”

~ Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

 “Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.”

~ Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars...”

~ Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes 

 “The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness.”

~ Ted Hughes, The Iron Man

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”

~ Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes

“So we found the end of our journey.
So we stood, alive in the river of light,
Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.”

~ Ted Hughes, River

“Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business”

~ Ted Hughes, The Thought-Fox

“In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness

But the jewel you lost was blue.”

~ Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“The brassy wood-pigeons
Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun
Rises upon a world well-tried and old.”

~ Ted Hughes, Stealing Trout on a May Morning

“You could become internationally famous - you're Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove.”

~ Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes

“The world’s decay where the wind’s hands have passed,
And my head, worn out with love, at rest
In my hands, and my hands full of dust,”

~ Ted Hughes, Song

“There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.”

~ Ted Hughes, A Modest Proposal

“He could not stand. It was not
That he could not thrive, he was born
With everything but the will –
That can be deformed, just like a limb.
Death was more interesting to him.
Life could not get his attention.”

~ Ted Hughes, Season Songs

“The Shell

The sea fills my ear
with sand and with fear.

You may wash out the sand,
but never the sound
of the ghost of the sea
that is haunting me.”

~ Ted Hughes, The Mermaid's Purse

“where are the gods
the gods hate us
the gods have run away
the gods have hidden in holes
the gods are dead of the plague
they rot and stink too

there never were any gods
there’s only death”

~ Ted Hughes, Seneca's Oedipus

“The dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her and I knew it”

~ Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

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