Joyce, James, 1882-1941

James Augustus Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a borough of Dublin, Ireland, the eldest of ten children who survived infancy. In 1888 he was enrolled at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Dublin, where he stayed until 1891. Thereafter he attended Belvedere College, and then University College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1902 with a major in Italian. While at UCD Joyce wrote a paper in defense of Henrik Ibsen's drama called Drama and Life, which was suppressed by the college president on moral grounds.

James Joyce's father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was a Cork man who had inherited enough property to ensure a comfortable living from rents, but his alcoholism led to a seemingly endless series of disasters which drove the family to abject poverty by the time young Joyce was mature. His mother, Mary Jane Murray, died of cancer soon after Joyce graduated from university; Joyce's autobiographical counterpart Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, is haunted by her memory. Young James was his father's favorite; he in turn seemed to forgive his father's weaknesses. Many of James Joyce's fictional characters and stories are indebted to his father's humorous stories of Dublin and its pubs.

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