JAMES JOYCE
Trieste: 1905-15
In 1905 the couple settled in Trieste, where Joyce began teaching English and befriended Italo
Svevo. Joyce and Nora had two children, Giorgio and Lucia, and eventually married in 1931. The
years in Trieste were difficult, full of disappointments and financial problems; Indeed,
Joyce was in trouble with publishers and printers over alleged obscene elements in his prose, and
consequently the first of his works to appear in book form was a collection of 36 short poems,
Chamber Music (1907). Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories about Dublin and its life, was
completed in 1905 but not published until the eve of the First World War. While not a huge
commercial success, the book caught the attention of the American poet Ezra Pound, who praised
Joyce for his unconventional style and voice, and helped him print A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (1916 ), his semi-autobiographical novel. Joyce also wrote most of his nature drama
Exiles in 1914.
Zurigo: 1915-20
In 1915 Joyce moved to Zurich with his family, as his position as a British citizen in Austrian-
occupied Trieste left him no alternative. Although the Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist had
established him as a writer, they had done little to ease his reign. financial difficulties. In 1917 he
received the first of several anonymous donations that enabled him to continue writing the novel
Ulysses, which began appearing in serial form in The Little Review in 1918, but was suspended in
1920 on obscenity charges.
Paris: 1920-40
In 1920 Joyce moved to Paris, where American-born bookseller Sylvia Beach agreed to publish
Ulysses in 1922. A limited edition
of 1,000 copies was followed by an English edition of 2,000 copies, also printed in Paris. The first
unlimited edition followed in 1924, again
in Paris, but there was no American edition until 1934, and no British edition until 1937. This novel
attracted praise and
harsh criticism; Pound cheered it and T.S. Eliot declared that Ulysses "was the most important
expression that the modern age has found"; Yeats
he considered it a work of genius. The novel traces the experiences of Mr Leopold Bloom, his wife
Molly and the poet Stephen Dedalus
from A Portrait of the Artist, in one day, Dublin, 16 June 1904. This successful period was also
characterized
from the worsening of Lucia's mental illness. Joyce encouraged her daughter's love of dancing,
painting and drawing and spared no expense to
promote his interests. deteriorated and was sent to a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of
Paris.Although this last decade
of Joyce's life was overshadowed by his daughter's illness, his increasing blindness and the death of
his father, he continued to write about what
it would eventually be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939. With its variety of puns and new
words, this novel
was even more difficult to read than his previous work. However, the book was an instant success,
earning him the honors of "book
of the Week" in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Zurich: 1940-41
In 1940, when France was occupied by the Germans, Joyce, Nora and Giorgio returned to Zurich,
the city that had welcomed them for the first time
