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James Augustine Aloysius Joyce  was born 2 February 1882 in Rathgar, Dublin. He was educated at Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College (Jesuit schools) and went on to study at University College, Dublin. His experimental writing is synonymous with modernism and he was a pioneer in challenging the form and structure of novel writing.

In 1902, Joyce stayed in Paris for a year and escaped what he perceived as the restrictiveness of Irish Catholicism. He returned to Ireland for the death of his mother, but left again with Nora Barnacle, with whom he went on to have a son and a daughter, Giorgio and Lucia. They lived in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris after World War One.

Chamber Music (1907), a book of verse, is Joyce's first published work and this was followed by the volume of short stories entitled Dubliners (1914), which had been written in 1905. This was published after numerous delays and destruction because of fear of libel. They were received with acclaim by Ezra Pound in a review of the influential magazine The Egoist. The autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published serially in this magazine from 1914 to 1915. In 1918, Exiles was published in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Ulysses is set on 16 June 1904, on the day Joyce he met Barnacle for a first date. Stephen Dedalus is one of the central characters, and he first appeared in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was originally published in Paris in 1922 (on Joyce's birthday) to mostly great critical acclaim. It was published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1934 and 1936 respectively after obscenity charges were successfully overturned.

Finnegans Wake, published finally in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1939, is Joyce's last major work and was deemed a critical failure. A fragment of it was first published in 1924 in the Transatlantic Review in Paris. Joyce died in 1941, aged 59, of a perforated ulcer.