James Joyce (1882–1941) revolutionized the novel, the short story, and modern literature as we know it. He was born in Dublin, the first of ten children in a Catholic family. His father was a civil servant whose poor financial judgment left the family impoverished for much of Joyce's youth. He attended Dublin's fine Jesuit schools, which gave him a firm grounding in theology and classical languages — subjects that repeatedly appeared in his later work. The story of his early life and his intellectual rebellion against Catholicism and Irish Nationalism are told in the largely autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), originally published in 1904 as Stephen Hero.

In 1902, at the age of twenty, Joyce left Dublin to spend the rest of his life in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich, with only occasional visits back home. Despite this self-imposed exile, Dublin was the setting for most of his writings. The Dubliners (1914) is a collection of short stories describing the paralyzing social mores of middle-class Catholic life. Its style is more accessible than most of Joyce's work. “The Dead,” the final story in the collection, is frequently listed as one of the finest short stories ever written.

Ulysses (1922)

Joyce spent seven years working on Ulysses; once he finished writing it, he almost couldn't find anyone to publish it. Once it was published, Ireland and the United States immediately banned it as obscene, and most people who located copies found the writing nearly incomprehensible. Despite these obstacles, Ulysses has come to be generally recognized as the most influential English novel of the twentieth century.

The novel was revolutionary in a number of ways. First, the structure was unique: Joyce re-created one full day in the life of his protagonist, Leopold Bloom, and modeled the actions of the story on those of Ulysses in the Odyssey (Ulysses is the Latin equivalent of the Greek name Odysseus). In recounting Bloom's day, Joyce mentions everything that happens — including thoughts, bodily functions, and sexual acts — providing a level of physical actuality never before achieved in literature. To provide psychological insight comparable to the physical detail, Joyce employed a then-revolutionary technique called stream of consciousness, in which the protagonist's thoughts are laid bare to the reader.

The most enjoyable part of Ulysses is the language itself, which is at times poetic, at times witty, and sometimes ridiculously erudite. It's been said that, to understand the novel fully, a reader must have a comprehensive understanding of Roman Catholic theology, church history, Judaism, Irish mythology and history, Dublin geography and slang, astronomy, Latin, Greek, Gaelic, and it wouldn't hurt to have a solid grounding in the last 3,000 years of Western cultural history. In other words, it's not an easy read, but for many people it's an immensely rewarding book.

Finnegan's Wake (1939)

From 1922 until 1939, Joyce worked on a vast, experimental novel that eventually became known as Finnegan's Wake. The novel, which recounts “the history of the world” through a family's dreams, employs its own “night language” of puns, foreign words, and literary allusions. It has no clear chronology or plot, it begins and ends on incomplete sentences that flow into each other, and some people aren't even sure it's in English. Many of Joyce's supporters thought he was wasting his time, although Samuel Beckett helped compile the final text when Joyce's eyesight was failing. Today, Finnegan's Wake is viewed as Joyce's most obscure and possibly most brilliant work.