Want to read a biographical sketch of James Joyce? Take a look at the Joyce biography page at The Brazen Head: A James Joyce Public House, the self-proclaimed best Joyce page on the web, and www.biography.com. The latter has a good written overview and video of Joyce's life. There is also the video, below, about Joyce that you might find of interest; however, if you are in the mood for watching a video, try the www.biography.com first; you might find it a little--a lot!-- more livelier. I did.
From The New York Times, July 6, 1961, Ernest Hemingway's admiration of James Joyce is highlighted: "Hemingway was quick to see the merit in the work of James Joyce. . . . In a letter to Sherwood Anderson dated March 9, 1922, Hemingway wrote:
"'Joyce has written a most goddam wonderful book (Ulysses) * * *. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving, but you can find the whole Celtic crew of them in Michaud,' (then a moderately expensive Paris eating place).
"Nevertheless, on several occasions Hemingway contributed to the funds raised to aid Joyce, with whom he did a considerable amount of stout drinking in Paris. When Joyce's Ulysses was pirated in the United States, Hemingway was one of the organizers of the protest which bore the names of many of the most distinguished figures in world literature."
James Joyce: "A small, thin unathletic man with very bad eyes," the narrator
of the above video says, so Hemingway stood between Joyce and a punch.
Joyce is known for four works of fiction, beginning with the collection of short stories Dubliners (Joyce attempted to publish in 1905; finally published in 1914), which contains 15 stories, including "Araby." Many of the stories have been staged in the theatre and made into films. John Huston directed "The Dead" in 1987, based on the last story in the collection. You can see a trailer of the film, or watch the complete film at Veoh. Here is an excerpt from The Dead's stage production from 2000.
News about Joyce's Dubliners, from "Joyce's Town", The New York Times: "In 1905, James Joyce wrote to the publisher Grant Richards: 'I do not think that any writer has yet presented Dublin to the world. It has been a capital of Europe for thousands of years, it is supposed to be the second city of the British Empire, and it is nearly three times as big as Venice.'
"But Joyce’s view of the city in Dubliners, his landmark collection of stories, had less grandeur than that pitch. The Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell recently wrote on Slate that Dublin in the book 'is a claustrophobic place, a place of entrapment and congenital disappointment, filled with frustrated people living thwarted lives. It is in every sense a small city.'
"On Tuesday, Penguin Classics is publishing a centennial edition of the book with a new foreword by Colum McCann, who writes that Dubliners, published nearly a decade after Joyce wrote the stories in it, 'was ripped up, burned, bowdlerized, rejected, resurrected, lost, dismissed, forgotten, thrown away, flogged, flayed and eventually celebrated.' A century later, it’s all celebration. In June, the fledgling Irish publisher Tramp Press will issue Dubliners 100, in which contemporary writers reimagine the collection’s 15 stories. Contributors include Patrick McCabe, Paul Murray, Eimear McBride and, perhaps bravest of all, Peter Murphy, who takes on 'The Dead,' considered by some the best story ever written." (Source: The New York Times, "Joyce's Town," by John Williams, May 23, 2014)
News about Joyce's Dubliners, from "Joyce's Town", The New York Times: "In 1905, James Joyce wrote to the publisher Grant Richards: 'I do not think that any writer has yet presented Dublin to the world. It has been a capital of Europe for thousands of years, it is supposed to be the second city of the British Empire, and it is nearly three times as big as Venice.'
"But Joyce’s view of the city in Dubliners, his landmark collection of stories, had less grandeur than that pitch. The Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell recently wrote on Slate that Dublin in the book 'is a claustrophobic place, a place of entrapment and congenital disappointment, filled with frustrated people living thwarted lives. It is in every sense a small city.'
"On Tuesday, Penguin Classics is publishing a centennial edition of the book with a new foreword by Colum McCann, who writes that Dubliners, published nearly a decade after Joyce wrote the stories in it, 'was ripped up, burned, bowdlerized, rejected, resurrected, lost, dismissed, forgotten, thrown away, flogged, flayed and eventually celebrated.' A century later, it’s all celebration. In June, the fledgling Irish publisher Tramp Press will issue Dubliners 100, in which contemporary writers reimagine the collection’s 15 stories. Contributors include Patrick McCabe, Paul Murray, Eimear McBride and, perhaps bravest of all, Peter Murphy, who takes on 'The Dead,' considered by some the best story ever written." (Source: The New York Times, "Joyce's Town," by John Williams, May 23, 2014)
Joyce also wrote three novels: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). You can read Joyce's Ulysses here.
Ulysses tells the story of Leopold Bloom as he travels around Dublin one June 16, 1904, known as Bloomsday, and fans of the novel celebrate it with public readings of its more than 700 pages. Influenced by Homer's poem The Odyssey, Joyce also pays homage to numerous literary styles. It was published to much acclaim for its sophisticated stylistic achievement and daring experimental features, including the so-called ""stream of consciousness," which takes the reader inside the mind of its characters. It has also attracted much controversy from the days of its publication when it was serialized in a literary magazine. Frequently banned and considered obscene for its depiction of a character masturbating the U.S. Post Office burned copies of it during the 1920s upon its arrival in the U.S.
Finnegans Wake, a novel that Joyce worked on from 1922 until its publication in 1939, is far more experimental. Read it here.
Ulysses tells the story of Leopold Bloom as he travels around Dublin one June 16, 1904, known as Bloomsday, and fans of the novel celebrate it with public readings of its more than 700 pages. Influenced by Homer's poem The Odyssey, Joyce also pays homage to numerous literary styles. It was published to much acclaim for its sophisticated stylistic achievement and daring experimental features, including the so-called ""stream of consciousness," which takes the reader inside the mind of its characters. It has also attracted much controversy from the days of its publication when it was serialized in a literary magazine. Frequently banned and considered obscene for its depiction of a character masturbating the U.S. Post Office burned copies of it during the 1920s upon its arrival in the U.S.
Finnegans Wake, a novel that Joyce worked on from 1922 until its publication in 1939, is far more experimental. Read it here.
Marilyn Monroe, unlike many dedicated readers, read to the end of Ulysses, we are to believe.
Here's a summary of Ulysses, with a particular focus on Molly Bloom, wife of the protagonist Leopold Bloom, and the book's legal and moralistic reception. Roger Marsh explains that "[T]he final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the most famous – some would say notorious – pieces of writing in 20th-century literature. It’s famous because, although very long, it’s written entirely without punctuation, as a so called ‘stream of consciousness’. It’s notorious because it was this chapter, principally, that got the book banned for 12 years following its first publication.
"In 1922, the arbiters of taste and decency in the English speaking world were not yet ready for explicit and intimate discussion of sex, especially from the mouth of a woman (even if they were put there by a male author). Nowadays, such explicit material is less remarkable and even the lack of punctuation seems less challenging in a world of text-speak. Even so, it’s hard to read, because Molly’s sleepy interior monologue drifts realistically from topic to topic, introducing thoughts and fragments of thoughts without warning, as they occur in real life. . . .
"Molly, meanwhile, remains at home, mostly in bed. The highlight of her day, as [her husband Leopold] Bloom well knows, is the arrival at 4pm of her most recent lover, Blazes Boylan. Boylan is a concert impresario who has organised a concert tour for Molly, and he has arranged to come over to her house and ‘go through the programme’ with her. Bloom knows full well what this means, and so, it seems, does the whole of Dublin. More than one of Bloom’s associates, when he informs them of the impending tour, asks him knowingly ‘who’s getting it up?’
"Normal marital relations between Leopold and Molly have, we learn, been non-existent for some years, ever since the death of their young son Rudi, which tore them apart. Molly, however, is a passionate, sexual woman in her prime, and the list of her lovers, all known to her husband, is long. Thus when Bloom climbs the stairs and prepares for bed in the early hours of 17 June, he takes up his usual position, his head at the foot of the double bed, muttering vaguely about eggs.
"At this point begins the long interior monologue – 22,000 words – which closes the novel. Bloom’s day is done, but Molly – having spent the day in bed, one way or another, is not finding sleep easy. Her mind races, first taking up the half-heard comment about eggs, and then quickly moving on to reminiscences of the distant and recent past. She recalls her husband’s pathetic attempts at infidelity, and her own rather more successful ones – these in very graphic detail. She assumes that Bloom ‘came somewhere’ – he did, but not in the way she imagines – and speculates about his latest liaisons. Often her mind drifts back to Gibraltar, where she lived as a girl, and to her father and other characters of those days. From time to time the songs she is to perform on the concert tour come into her head. In particular, the popular ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ pre-occupies her – how to enunciate certain words, and the protracted note on the word ‘so-o-o-ong’, which seems to be echoed by passing trains: ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling…’. Unable to move much in bed for fear of waking her husband, she also wrestles with bodily discomforts (wind, the onset of her period) and eventually finds it necessary to slip out and use the chamber pot beside the bed.
"Finally, towards dawn, she begins to succumb to sleep. Romantically, her final thoughts are of the day that she agreed to marry Bloom (‘well as well him as another’) lying in the grass up on Howth Head above Dublin Bay, and she remembers how she got him to propose to her. There is an inevitability about her answer, for throughout the soliloquy Molly has punctuated her stream of consciousness with the word ‘yes’, thrown in almost as a marker for a new topic or a change of mood. As the chapter reaches its closing lines, the appearance of the word ‘yes’ increases in regularity, until the final line reads: ‘he could feel my breast all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.’ And here Joyce writes the chapter’s only full stop."
Joyce visiting with American expatriate Sylvia Beach,
proprietor of the celebrated bookstore Shakespeare & Co.,
in Paris, circa 1922. Beech was a champion of Joyce's Ulysses.
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