James Joyce was born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882, and died in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13, 1941. His father came from a well-to-do Cork family that invested him with the means and standing to consider himself “a gentleman.” A boisterous, entertaining character, he failed to develop a sustained career or profession. Joyce's mother was a cultured, even-tempered woman whose efforts to maintain her family in middle-class comfort and respectability were eroded by sustained pregnancies and debts that consumed her husband's legacy and drove the family into deeper and deeper poverty. Bythe time Joyce was 12 years old, the family had 10 surviving children, 11 mortgages, and no remaining property. As the eldest child, James Joyce felt the family decline in his own fortunes. An early beginning at a prestigious Jesuit boarding school led to a poverty-stricken adolescence, marked by evictions to more and more squalid quarters and the death of a beloved…