James Joyce James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, and poet. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for "Ulysses" (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's "Odyssey" are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. Other well-known 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).
James Joyce (biography) and digested the whole of it—except perhaps my friend Richard Ellmann." Ellmann quotes extensively from "Finnegans Wake" as epigraphs in his biography of Joyce. James Joyce (biography) James Joyce by Richard Ellmann was published in 1959 (a revised edition was released in 1982). It provides an intimate and detailed account of the life of Irish modernist James Joyce, which informs an understanding of this author's complex works. Anthony Burgess was so impressed with the biographer's work that he claimed it to be "the greatest literary biography of the century." Edna O'Brien, the Irish novelist, remarked that "H. G. Wells said