"His writing is not about something. It is that something itself." (Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s friend and secretary, about Finnegans Wake)

James Joyce is the high priest of modernist writing who lived a life of endless sacrifice to literature, loaded with poverty and petty humiliations. He blazed the path of the writer as resolute individualist, rejecting all conformity and risking everything, even public shaming, in order to "communicate" over the supine body of language with his enthralled readers. He once remarked to his younger brother Stanislaus, “Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying...to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own...for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.”

Joyce pioneered modern literature through his use of stream of consciousness, a literary technique that lets readers get straight into the mind of the book’s characters and stands in stark contrast to Ernest Hemingway's "iceberg" style of leaving things to the readers' imaginations. In his masterpiece Ulysses, Joyce explores several topics and thoughts that go through the mind of one man in Dublin for a day, and he also wrote other critically-acclaimed works such as the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

He said of his frequent use of Dublin as a setting, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

The Life and Legacy of James Joyce: Pioneer of Modern Literature profiles the life and career of one of America's most famous entertainers. You will learn about Joyce like you never have before, in no time at all.