Joyce studied at the University College, Dublin, where he found his early inspirations from the works of Henrik Ibsen, St.Thomas Aquinas and W.B. Yeats. After graduation in 1902 Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, teacher and in other occupations in difficult financial conditions. Joyce's return back to Ireland didn't last long, and he left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle (they married in 1931), staying in Pola, Austria-Hungary, and in Trieste.

In 1915 Joyce moved with his family to Zürich, where he started to develope the early chapters of Ulysses, which was first published in France because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States. However, the book, which takes place on one day in Dublin (June 16, 1904) and reflected the classic work of Homer (fl. 9th or 8th century BC?), gained immediate success. The main characters are Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, the hero from Joyce's earlier novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope. The story, using stream-of-consciousness technique, parallel the major events in Odysseus' journey home.

In Paris Joyce started his second major work, Finnegans Wake, suffering at the same time chronic eye troubles caused by glaucoma.

After the fall of France in WWII Joyce returned to Zürich, where he died still disapointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake. The book was based on the cyclic theory of history of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744).

See also: Samuel Beckett, William Butler Yeats, Marcel Proust

NOTE: According to tradition, Homer was blind. From 1917 to 1930 Joyce endured several eye operations, being totally blind for short intervals. - Joyce's daughter suffered from schizophrenia and she was among Carl Jung's patients in the 1930s.

Selected works:

• DUBLINERS, 1914 - Dublinilaisia
• A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, 1916
• EXILES, 1918
• ULYSSES, 1922 film 1967, dir. by Joseph Strick
• POEMS PENYEACH, 1927
• FINNEGANS WAKE, 1939
• STEPHEN HERO, 1944
• GIACOMO JOYCE, 1968