1. James Joyce 1882-1941

2. James Joyce  He is considered the greatest master of languages since Milton.  At age twenty, Joyce left Ireland for Paris, rebelling against his homeland and rejecting all values which he had brought up to adhere to.  Before leaving Ireland, he began one of his best known works Dubliners, a collection of short stories about Dublin life.

3. James Joyce  With rapidly deteriorating eyesight, Joyce sought to leave a lasting impression upon the literary world.  His work Ulysses, modeled after Homer’s Odyssey, is often considered his greatest work.  It includes Joyce’s distinct style of delivery, made-up words, allusions, extended use of puns, and symbollic paralellism.  Because of its immoral content, however, over one thousand copies of Ulysses were confiscated and burned by both the USPS and British Customs.  His last work Finnegans Wake, took seventeen years to complete.  It even surpasses Ulysses in its extravagant narrative delivery.  In it, Joyce employs stream of consciousness (interior monologue technique which involves the delving into the operation of the human mind in a waking or dreaming state.)