James Augusta Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882 – January 13, 1941) as born 1882 in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. The eldest of ten surviving children, he grew up in Dublin and attended Jesuit schools where the good fathers were duly impressed and not a little intimidated by his formidable intelligence. Joyce took to literature early on, displaying an uncanny facility for reading, analyzing, memorizing  and commenting upon the Irish literature of that time and how the next generation of Irish writers (read: Joyce, himself) might be improve upon the then current model. He wrote short stories, Dubliners (1906), which contains his universally accepted masterpiece, The Dead. He met Nora Barnacle and, with the unfinished manuscript of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in hand, moved with Nora to Trieste to escape the claustrophobic confines of British rule, Catholic dogma and family conventions. He began his great work, Ulysses, which he continued and finished in Paris ten years later in 1922. On publication Ulysses ranked Joyce with the greatest writers in English. With the outbreak of World War II, Joyce moved to Zurich where he put the finishing touches on his fourth, least accessible and most difficult work, Finnegan’s Wake. Having struggled with blindness by cataracts and other health problems, and having become very depressed over the failing mental health of his brilliant daughter Lucia, Joyce died in 1941 at the age of 59.