James Joyce
Irish · 1882–1941
James Joyce was an Irish modernist novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. His major works — the short story collection Dubliners, the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the encyclopedic Ulysses — pioneered techniques like free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, and pushed the formal possibilities of the novel further with the dream-language experiment of Finnegans Wake. Born in Dublin, he spent most of his adult life in self-imposed exile on the Continent, but Dublin remained the obsessive setting of nearly everything he wrote.