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James Joyce
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James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, still widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the modernist avant-garde movement in the twentieth century. He is best known for Ulysses (1922), a seminal work in which the episodes of Homer's sprawling epic The Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these, the stream-of-consciousness technique he pioneered and perfected. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His complete oeuvre also includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. Joyce was born to a middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe does not extend far beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I
