I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.
1882 - Born February 2 in Rathgar, Dublin. First of ten surviving children of John and May Joyce.
1888-1898 - Educated at Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College. Brilliant student. The trauma of his father's financial ruin. "Silence, exile, and cunning."
1898-1902 - University College Dublin. Studies modern languages. Refuses to sign a nationalist petition. Already planning escape.
1904 - June 10: First meets Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Galway. June 16: Their first date - the day that would become Bloomsday. October: They leave Ireland together, unmarried, for Trieste.
1907 - Chamber Music, poems, published. First of his books in print.
1914 - Dubliners finally published after years of censorship battles. "The Dead" closes the collection.
1916 - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man published. Stephen Dedalus is born.
1918-1920 - Ulysses serialized in The Little Review. Four issues seized and burned by the US Post Office.
1922 - February 2: Ulysses published in Paris by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company on Joyce's 40th birthday. Banned in the US and UK.
1927-1939 - Works on Finnegans Wake (called "Work in Progress" for years). His eyesight fails. Dozens of surgeries. He dictates to Samuel Beckett.
1931 - Finally marries Nora in London, for inheritance purposes. They had two children: Giorgio (1905) and Lucia (1907).
1933 - Ulysses ruled not obscene by US District Court Judge John M. Woolsey: "a serious and honest book."
1939 - Finnegans Wake published. World War II begins. The Joyces flee Paris.
1941 - Dies January 13 in Zurich after surgery for a perforated ulcer. Age 58. Buried in Fluntern Cemetery. Nora: "He was a great sinner."
Chamber Music (1907) - 36 lyric poems
Dubliners (1914) - 15 short stories, ending with "The Dead"
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) - Stephen Dedalus's awakening
Exiles (1918) - A play
Ulysses (1922) - One day in Dublin. Leopold Bloom. Molly. Yes.
Pomes Penyeach (1927) - 13 poems
Finnegans Wake (1939) - The night to Ulysses's day. Language dissolved and remade.
Nora Barnacle (1884-1951) - the woman who walked out with Joyce on June 16, 1904. Chambermaid. "She doesn't understand a word I write," Joyce said, "but she holds my head when I'm sick." She outlived him by ten years and is buried beside him in Zurich.
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.