Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is published
On this day in 1916 James Joyces book Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is published in New York.The book had been previously serialized in Ezra Pounds review The Egoist.James Joyce was born in Dublin the eldest of 10 children of a cheerful neer-do-well who eventually went bankrupt.Joyce attended Catholic school and University College in Dublin where he learned Dano-Norwegian so he could read the plays of Henrik Ibsen in the original.
In college he began a lifetime of literary rebellion self-publishing an essay rejected by the schools literary magazine adviser.After graduation Joyce moved to Paris.He resolved to study medicine to support himself while writing but soon gave it up.He returned to Dublin to visit his mothers deathbed and remained to teach school and work odd jobs.
On June 16 1904 he met Nora whom he convinced to return to Europe with him.The couple settled in Trieste where they had two children and then in Zurich.Joyce struggled with serious eye problems undergoing 25 operations for various troubles between 1917 and 1930.In 1914 he published The Dubliners and his 1915 novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man brought him fame and the patronage of several wealthy people including Edith Rockefeller.In 1918 his revolutionary stream of consciousness novel Ulysses began to be serialized in the American journal Little Review.
However the U.S.Post Office stopped the publications distribution in December of that year on the grounds that the novel was obscene.Sylvia Beach owner of bookstore Shakespeare and Co.
in Paris where Joyce moved in 1920 published the novel herself in 1922 but it was banned in the United Kingdom and the United States until 1933.Joyces final novel Finnegans Wake was published in 1939 and Joyce died in 1941.
