He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is an influential modernist writer who wrote in a ground-breaking style that was known both for its complexity and explicit content and is regarded as one of the most and important authors of the 20th century.
Did you know:
His masterpiece, Ulysses, was published on his fortieth birthday – and wasn’t. In fact, much of the novel had already appeared in print in two magazines, the Little Review and the Egoist, by the time the novel was published by Shakespeare & Company on 2 February 1922. (Joyce very deliberately made the publication of the novel coincide with his own birthday.) And even then, only two copies actually appeared on that day: these were whisked to Paris by morning train to Sylvia Beach, who ran the publishing house. Beach kept one copy, while Joyce took the other copy out with him to mark the occasion.
He gave us the word ‘quark’. This word for a subatomic particle was taken from Finnegans Wake, where three seabirds give the cheer to King Mark: ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark!’ Physicist Murray Gell-Mann liked the word, and so proposed it for the particle in the 1960s.
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