“Though he admired writers as diverse as Daniel Defoe and Gustave Flaubert, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Joyce consciously staged an agon with Dane and with Shakespeare.” -Harold Bloom, The Bright Book of Life.

In two magisterial works, James Joyce, a lucid and tuneful Irish writer of stories and poetry, leapt from the hardscrabble streets of Dublin into the first ranks of the Modernist avant garde. Those preternaturally exceptional works were: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, (1916), and the inimitably florabundant, Ulysses, first published in Paris in 1922. Joyce’s life was that of the expatriate. He was a drinking man, and in later years, his eyesight failed nearly as bad as Milton’s would, making him a kind of Tiresias character on the mid-century literary scene. Joyce’s effect on modern literature is almost impossible to overstate. Not only did his work influence American jurisprudence regarding obscenity, he exemplified the life of a writer’s writer, pushing the capabilities of the novel to the brink, first in Ulysses and then in the sublimely unreadable Finnegans Wake (1939). His acolyte and devotee, Samuel Beckett, would change the face of 20th century theater with his groundbreaking work, En Attendant Godot, and would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1969). Joyce himself, the master practitioner, died in Zürich, ulcerated, bedraggled, and on the run from the Nazis, an ending as impacted, bleak, musical, and magnificent as a line of his own muscular prose.