James Joyce or James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin Ireland. He enjoys wide acclaim for his experimental use of language and employing innovative literary methods in his most noted fictions such as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce, the eldest of ten siblings from a poverty-stricken family, educated himself under his mother’s guidance and then attended a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin where he proved himself academically. Thereafter, he studied language in the University College, Dublin. He was a widely read and an experimental author, visibly influenced by the symbolists and the realists of the second half of the nineteenth century.

At the age of nine, Joyce wrote a poem Et Tu Healy in 1891 on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish nationalist politician. The poem was printed and given to friends by his father who thought his sentiments and anger at Charles Stewart for betraying the Irish Catholic Church and Irish Parliamentary Party was expressed adequately by his son. This was the first ever exposure of his literary abilities among his known people.

Joyce began his early education in Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare, which he had to leave in 1891 when his family slid into penury. His father John Joyce’s name got published in the list of debtors and bankrupts that year and two years later he was dismissed from office with a small pension.

Thereafter Joyce studied at home, attended Christian Brothers O’Connell School for a brief period, then attended the Jesuits’ Dublin school, Belvedere College, in 1891 for five years without fee. It was benevolently arranged by a Jesuit priest whom the family knew. His skills of writing got initial recognition when Joyce won the first position for English composition twice before graduating in 1898. At University College he studied English, French and Italian and was quite active in many Dublin’s theatrical and literary circles. In 1901, he developed a friendship with Oliver St. John Gogarty, based on whose personality Joyce created the character Buck Mulligan in his novel Ulysses.

Joyce was always interested in Irish national politics and his novels have time and again dealt with socialist, anarchist and Irish nationalist issues. Joyce was quite deeply influenced by Roman Catholicism. Even though Joyce claimed he was never a Catholic, critics say that he had never quite abandoned his faith. They also cite that his two well-known classics, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake expressed his Catholic sensibility. Throughout his life, there was the duality of the modern sensibilities in him to refute Catholic traditions, customs and beliefs and the tradition-steeped corner of his mind that remotely maintained allegiance to the norms of Catholicism.

Irish middle-class life of Dublin has been beautifully captured in Dubliners published in 1914 as a collection of 15 short stories. His A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a brilliant example of the technique of stream of consciousness and interior monologue.