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 TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY:
Celebrating the birthday of Irish novelist and poet, JAMES JOYCE.

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.

Joyce’s novels, with their innovative language, use of dialogue, characteristic modernist forms, and social frankness, met with resistance when they first appeared in print. Ulysses was serialized in the United States and England before Sylvia Beach, of the bookstore Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, published it as a complete book. It was banned in the United States from 1922 until 1933.

Did you know:


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.

His masterpiece, Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Now, Joyce fans worldwide now celebrate 16 June as Bloomsday.

Joyce’s first published book was Chamber Music, a collection of 36 love poems. His poetry was noticed by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and included in Pound’s influential Imagist Anthology of 1914. Pound wrote of Chamber Music: “the quality and distinction of the poems in the first half … is due in part to their author’s strict musical training … the wording is Elizabethan, the metres at times suggesting Herrick.” Known as a lyric poet, Joyce based some of his poems on songs. His poems have been set to music by composers including Geoffrey Moyneux Palmer, Ross Lee Finney, Samuel Barber, and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, as well as the group Sonic Youth. Despite his poetic success, Joyce is better known as a novelist, and by 1932 he had stopped writing poetry altogether.


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