James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882 – 1941), an Irish novelist and poet, is considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Having begun with the comparatively conventional narrative style of the Dubliners (1914), he moved towards more formal experimentation with novels like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). He is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. . His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.