James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish writer and poet, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Along with Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, Joyce is a key figure in the development of the modernist novel. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922). Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Although most of his adult life was spent outside the country, Joyce's Irish experiences are essential to his writings and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. In particular, his rocky early relationship with the Irish Catholic Church is reflected by a similar conflict in his character Stephen Dedalus, who appears in two of his novels. His fictional universe is firmly rooted in Dublin and reflects his family life and the events and friends (and enemies) from his school and college days; Ulysses is set with precision in the real streets and alleyways of the city. As the result of the combination of this attention to one place, and his lengthy travels throughout Europe, notably in Paris, Joyce paradoxically became both one of the most cosmopolitan yet most regionally focused of all the English language writers of his time.[1] James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. He was the oldest of ten surviving children; two of his siblings died of typhoid. His father's family, originally from Fermoy in Cork, had once owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's father and paternal grandfather both married into wealthy families. In 1887, his father was appointed rate (i.e., a local property tax) collector by Dublin Corporation; the family subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town of Bray 12 miles (19 km) from Dublin. Around this time Joyce was attacked by a dog, which engendered in him a lifelong canine phobia. He also suffered from a fear of thunderstorms, that his deeply religious aunt had described to him as a sign of God's wrath.[2] In 1891, Joyce wrote a poem, "Et Tu Healy," on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. His father was angry at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic church and at the resulting failure to secure Home Rule for Ireland. The elder Joyce had the poem printed and even sent a part to the Vatican Library. In November of that same year, John Joyce was entered in Stubbs Gazette (an official register of bankruptcies) and suspended from work. In 1893, John Joyce was dismissed with a pension, beginning the family's slide into poverty due mainly to John's drinking and general financial mismanagement.[3] James Joyce began his education at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane in County Kildare, which he entered in 1888 but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees. Joyce then studied at home and briefly at the Christian Brothers school on North Richmond Street, Dublin, before he was offered a place in the Jesuits', Dublin school, Belvedere College, in 1893. The offer reflected, at least in part, the hope that he would prove to have a vocation and join the Order. Joyce, however, rejected Catholicism by the age of 16, although the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas continued to influence him strongly throughout his life.[4] He enrolled at the recently established University College Dublin (UCD) in 1898, and studied modern languages, specifically English, French and Italian. He also became active in theatrical and literary circles in the city. His review of Ibsen's New Drama, his first published work, was published in "Fortnightly Review" in 1900 and resulted in a letter of thanks from the Norwegian dramatist himself. Joyce wrote a number of other articles and at least two plays (since lost) during this period. Many of the friends he made at University College Dublin would appear as characters in Joyce's written works. After graduating from UCD in 1903, Joyce left for Paris; ostensibly to study medicine, but in reality he squandered money his family could ill afford. He returned to Ireland after a few months, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer.[5] Fearing for her son's "impiety", his mother tried unsuccessfully to get Joyce to make his confession and to take communion. She finally passed into a coma and died on 13 August, Joyce having refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her bedside.[6] After her death he continued to drink heavily, and conditions at home grew quite appalling. He scraped a living reviewing books, teaching and singing—he was an accomplished tenor, and won the bronze medal in the 1904 Feis Ceoil.[7] On 7 January 1904, he attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, in a day, only to have it rejected from the free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story and turn it into a novel he planned to call Stephen Hero, though he never actually published the novel under this original name. The same year he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Connemara, County Galway who was working as a chambermaid. On 16 June 1904, they went on their first date, an event which would be commemorated by providing the date for the action of Ulysses. Joyce remained in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily. After one of these drinking binges, he got into a fight over a misunderstanding with a man in Phoenix Park; he was picked up and dusted off by a minor acquaintance of his father's, Alfred H. Hunter, who brought him into his home to tend to his injuries.[8] Hunter was rumored to be a Jew and to have an unfaithful wife, and would serve as one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the main protagonist of Ulysses.[9] He took up with medical student Oliver St John Gogarty, who formed the basis for the character Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. After staying in Gogarty's Martello Tower for six nights he left in the middle of the night following an altercation which involved Gogarty shooting a pistol at some pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed.[10] He walked all the way back to Dublin to stay with relatives for the night, and sent a friend to the tower the next day to pack his trunk. Shortly thereafter he eloped to the continent with Nora. Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile, moving first to Zürich, where he had supposedly acquired a post to teach English at the Berlitz Language School through an agent in England. It turned out that the English agent had been swindled, but the director of the school sent him on to Trieste, which was part of Austria-Hungary until World War I (today part of Italy). Once again, he found there was no position for him, but with the help of Almidano Artifoni, director of the Trieste Berlitz school, he finally secured a teaching position in Pola, then also part of Austria-Hungary (today part of Croatia). He stayed there, teaching English mainly to Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the Pola base, from October 1904 until March 1905, when the Austrians—having discovered an espionage ring in the city—expelled all aliens. With Artifoni's help, he moved back to Trieste and began teaching English there. He would remain in Trieste for most of the next ten years.[1] Later that year Nora gave birth to their first child, George. Joyce then managed to talk his brother, Stanislaus, into joining him in Trieste, and secured him a position teaching at the school. James's ostensible reasons were desire for Stanislaus's company and the hope of offering him a more interesting life than that of his simple clerking job in Dublin. In truth, though, James hoped to augment his family's meagre income with his brother's earnings.[11] Stanislaus and James had strained relations throughout the time they lived together in Trieste, with most arguments centering on James's drinking habits and frivolity with money.[12] With the chronic wanderlust of James's early years, he became frustrated with life in Trieste and moved to Rome in late 1906, having secured employment in a bank. He intensely disliked Rome, and moved back to Trieste in early 1907. His daughter Lucia was born in the summer of the same year.[13] Joyce returned to Dublin in the summer of 1909 with George, in order to visit his father and work on getting Dubliners published. He visited Nora's family in Galway, meeting them for the first time (a successful visit, to his relief). While preparing to return to Trieste he decided to take one of his sisters, Eva, back with him to help Nora run the home. He spent only a month in Trieste before returning to Dublin, this time as a representative of some cinema owners hoping to set up a regular cinema in Dublin. The venture was successful (but quickly fell apart in Joyce's absence), and he returned to Trieste in January 1910 with another sister, Eileen, in tow. Eva became very homesick for Dublin and returned there a few years later, but Eileen spent the rest of her life on the continent, eventually marrying Czech bank cashier Frantisek Schaurek. Joyce returned to Dublin briefly in the summer of 1912 during his years-long fight with his Dublin publisher, George Roberts, over the publication of Dubliners. His trip was once again fruitless, and on his return he wrote the poem "Gas from a Burner" as an invective against Roberts. After this trip, he never again came closer to Dublin than London, despite many pleas from his father and invitations from fellow Irish writer William Butler Yeats. Joyce concocted a number of money-making schemes during this period, including an attempt to become a cinema magnate in Dublin. He also frequently discussed but ultimately abandoned a plan to import Irish tweeds to Trieste. His skill at borrowing money saved him from indigence. What income he had came partially from his position at the Berlitz school and partially from teaching private students. Many acquaintances made through his private teaching proved invaluable allies when he faced difficulty getting out of Austria-Hungary and into Switzerland in 1915.