James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Irish Séamus Seoighe; 2 February
1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely
considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th
century. He is best known for his landmark novels Ulysses (1922)
and Finnegans Wake (1939), the short story collection Dubliners
(1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man (1916). Although his adult life was largely spent
outside the country, Joyce's fictional universe is firmly rooted in
Dublin and provide the settings and much of the subject matter for
all his fiction. In particular, his tempestuous early relationship
with the Irish Roman Catholic Church is reflected through a similar
inner conflict in his recurrent alter ego Stephen Dedalus. As the
result of his minute attentiveness to a personal locale and his
self-imposed exile and influence throughout Europe, Joyce became
simultaneously one of the most cosmopolitan and one of the most
local of all the great English language writers.

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