The Dead (short story) The Dead (short story) "The Dead" is the final story in the 1914 collection "Dubliners" by James Joyce. The other stories in the collection are shorter, whereas at 15,952 words, "The Dead" is long enough to be described as a novella. The story deals with themes of love and loss as well as raising questions about the nature of the Irish identity. Gabriel Conroy, Gretta Conroy, Kate and Julia Morkan, and Bartell d'Arcy are all alluded to in James Joyce's later work, "Ulysses", though no character from "The Dead" makes a direct appearance in the novel. The story centres on
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