James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. During childhood he was educated at Jesuit schools and then continued his studies at University College in Dublin, where he studied French, Italian, German and English languages and literatures. He graduated in modern languages in 1902. He established himself on the continent, precisely in Paris, but, in 1903, he had to return in Dublin because the mother’s fatal illness. A year later he fell in love with Nora Barnacle, a twenty-year-old girl who was working as a chambermaid in a hotel. In this period they settled in Trieste (Italy) and Joyce began teaching English and made friends with Italo Svevo. James and Nora had two children and he married in 1931. The writer, with a lots of financial problems, published his works: Chamber Music (1907), Dubliners (1914), Exiles (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
In 1917 he received the first of several anonymous donations which enabled him to continue writing Ulysses, started in 1904, which was published in Paris in 1922. In 1923 he became to write “Finnegans Wake”, published in 1939. James Joyce died in January 1941, in Switzerland.