James Joyce, The Years of Growth, 1882-1915. A Biography

This book is the first completely new biography of James Joyce for a generation. It will prove both controversial and essential. James Joyce left Dublin in 1904, when he was twenty-two, and for the next decade taught and worked in Pola, Trieste and Rome. He visited his native Dublin for the last time in 1912, leaving after an acrimonious dispute with a publisher and spending the rest of his life on the Continent. By the time he was thirty he had already had the vast majority of experiences on which his intensely autobiographical literary output was based. Peter Costello, Joycean scholar and native Dubliner, draws on recently discovered or previously overlooked sources to show how Joyce's early life -- his education, his relationship with his brothers and sisters, his youthful loss of faith, his first sexual experiences, his meeting with Nora Barnacle -- shaped so much he was to write in later years. With the publication of his first writing in 1915 came immediate literary respect and fame in Europe and America. From then on he was always the center of attention. But, as Peter Costello argues with conviction and passion, it was the earlier period of obscurity which provided Joyce with the material for Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and even the much later Finnegans Wake and was therefore the most significant and interesting period of his life. The theme of James Joyce: the Years of Growth is the theme of all Joyce's work -- the transformation of raw life into art. The network of friendships surrounding Joyce's family, of which he was to make so much use in Ulysses, receives special attention. Ulysses is very much a book about a city and a community, a community which was largely that of Joyce's father. Joyce as a writer owed a tremendous debt to his story-telling father. The majority of the characters in Ulysses were friends of John Joyce, who contributed more than has been realized to the make-up of Leopold Bloom. By taking an historical rather than purely biographical approach, Peter Costello places Joyce firmly in the context of the Dublin of his youth, frequently refutes accepted fact and discovers a new portrait of James Joyce.