60 Fun Facts About James Joyce

In which Dublin suburb was James Joyce born in 1882?

He was born at 41 Brighton Square, the eldest of ten surviving siblings, and the family moved often as his father's finances collapsed.

On what date is Bloomsday celebrated each year?

It is the day on which the whole of Ulysses takes place, and fans in Edwardian dress retrace Bloom's route around Dublin.

In which year was Ulysses first published as a complete book?

The book follows three Dubliners through a single day in 1904, and its fans now celebrate that date every year.

Ulysses parallels the episodes of which ancient epic poem?

Bloom stands in for the wandering Greek hero, Stephen Dedalus for his son Telemachus and Molly for the waiting Penelope.

What was the name of Joyce's lifelong partner, later his wife?

She was a chambermaid from Galway working at Finn's Hotel when they met in June 1904, and the relationship lasted 37 years.

Who is the advertisement canvasser at the centre of Ulysses?

He is the son of a Hungarian Jew named Virág, which means 'flower' and explains the surname the family adopted.

How many short stories make up Dubliners?

Written between 1904 and 1907, the stories move from childhood to age and end with the long story 'The Dead'.

In which city was Ulysses first published as a complete book?

No English or American printer would touch it, so a small Left Bank bookshop became a publisher for the occasion.

Which bookshop owner published Ulysses in 1922?

Her shop, Shakespeare and Company, had only opened in 1919; she offered to publish the book after watching Joyce fail to find anyone else.

Ulysses was published on Joyce's birthday. Which birthday was it?

Joyce insisted on the date and the first three copies arrived from the printer that morning, 2 February 1922.

How many years did Joyce spend composing Finnegans Wake?

Its title was kept secret until publication day in May 1939; before that the world knew it only as 'Work in Progress'.

Which physicist borrowed the word 'quark' from Finnegans Wake?

The line he lifted was 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!', which suited him because quarks were then thought to come in threes.

In which city did Joyce die in January 1941?

He had fled occupied France only weeks earlier and died two days after surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer, aged 58.

What is the name of the young playwright Joyce hired as an assistant, who later wrote Waiting for Godot?

He collected foreign words on cards for Joyce's last book, and the friendship cooled after he rebuffed Joyce's daughter.

Which American poet became Joyce's champion, getting A Portrait of the Artist serialised in The Egoist?

He first wrote to Joyce on Yeats's advice, asking to reprint a Chamber Music poem in an Imagist anthology.

In which Austro-Hungarian port city did Joyce live for most of the years 1905 to 1915?

He called it a second Dublin, taught English at the Berlitz school there, and worked out Leopold and Molly Bloom in the city.

What is the title of the last and longest story in Dubliners?

At nearly 16,000 words it is sometimes called a novella, and John Huston filmed it in 1987 as his final movie.

Which Jesuit boarding school did the six-year-old Joyce enter in 1888?

He had to leave in 1891 when his father could no longer pay the fees; the school reappears in the opening of A Portrait.

Which American judge ruled in December 1933 that Ulysses was not obscene?

His opinion famously conceded that the book was in places 'somewhat emetic' but nowhere an aphrodisiac.

Which US publisher deliberately had a copy of Ulysses seized by Customs to set up the 1933 test case?

Customs waved the parcel through, so lawyer Morris Ernst had to carry it back and demand it be seized.

In which Dublin suburb did Joyce and Nora take their first walk together on 16 June 1904?

They had met only six days earlier, on 10 June, when she was working as a chambermaid in the city.

In which town or city was Joyce's wife Nora born?

Her childhood home on Bowling Green is now a small museum dedicated to her life.

In what year did Joyce and Nora finally marry, in a London register office?

They had lived together for 27 years by then; the ceremony was partly to secure their children's inheritance under English law.

How many episodes make up Ulysses?

They are split into three parts of 3, 12 and 3, and the Homeric titles like 'Circe' and 'Ithaca' never appear in the text itself.

How many numbered copies made up the first edition of Ulysses?

One hundred were signed on Dutch handmade paper at 350 francs, and by one scholar's count the edition contained over 2,000 errors.

In which French city was the first edition of Ulysses printed?

The printer, Maurice Darantiere, later reused the same plates for the Egoist Press edition sold in England.

Which magazine serialised Ulysses in the US from 1918 to 1920, leading to an obscenity conviction?

Its editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were prosecuted after printing the 'Nausicaa' episode, and the Post Office burned copies.

What does Bloom go out to buy for his breakfast in the 'Calypso' episode?

The episode opens by announcing that he ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

At what Dublin address do Leopold and Molly Bloom live?

The house's front door was rescued from demolition and now hangs in the James Joyce Centre.

Where was Molly Bloom born?

Her father was Major Tweedy, an Irish officer, and her mother Lunita Laredo was of Spanish descent; a bronze of Molly stands in the Alameda Gardens there.

What is unusual about the final 'Penelope' episode of Ulysses?

Molly's monologue runs to eight paragraphs and both begins and ends with the word 'yes'; Nora's own letters were similarly unpunctuated.

Which episode of Ulysses is written as a play script, complete with stage directions?

It is set in Nighttown, Dublin's red-light district, and became the 1958 off-Broadway show Ulysses in Nighttown with Zero Mostel as Bloom.

In which episode of Ulysses does the prose recapitulate the whole history of English style?

It is set in a maternity hospital, and the evolving language is meant to mirror the nine months of a pregnancy.

How many nights did Joyce actually spend in the Martello tower at Sandycove that opens Ulysses?

He fled after his host Oliver Gogarty and another lodger fired a revolver at pans hanging over his bed in the middle of the night.

Which university friend leased the Sandycove tower and inspired 'stately, plump' Buck Mulligan?

A medical student and later a senator, he claimed he wanted the tower for the purpose of 'Hellenising' Ireland.

In which cemetery, in the city where he died, is Joyce buried?

In 1966 he was moved to an 'honour grave' beside a seated bronze of him by the American sculptor Milton Hebald.

Which country's government refused Nora's request to repatriate Joyce's remains after his death?

Two senior Irish diplomats were in Switzerland at the time, but only the British consul attended the funeral.

In which Irish music competition did Joyce win a medal as a tenor in May 1904?

The judge would have placed him first but for his poor sight-reading; the medal was later bought at auction by dancer Michael Flatley.

The Dublin picture house Joyce helped launch in 1909, the country's first dedicated cinema, was called what?

Backed by businessmen from Trieste, it opened on Mary Street on 20 December 1909; Joyce pulled out after seven months.

In which language did the young Joyce write a fan letter to the playwright Henrik Ibsen?

His very first publication, in 1900, was a review of Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken; his own only play, Exiles, is often called Ibsenite.

How many poems are in Chamber Music, Joyce's first published book (1907)?

Two poems were added late, including 'I hear an army charging upon the land', which Yeats called a technical and emotional masterpiece.

Under what working title was Finnegans Wake published in instalments for more than a decade?

Ford Madox Ford used the label first in 1924 when he printed the 'Mamalujo' episode in The Transatlantic Review.

Which wealthy English editor of The Egoist supported Joyce financially for life and paid for his funeral?

She set up the Egoist Press at her own expense to publish A Portrait when nobody else would.

Joyce's daughter Lucia trained professionally in which art before her illness?

Born in Trieste with Italian as her first language, she studied at the Dalcroze Institute in Paris and performed with a six-woman troupe.

Which famous psychiatrist treated Lucia Joyce, and had earlier likened Ulysses to schizophrenic writing?

He said father and daughter were two people going into a river, one diving and the other falling.

In 1911 Joyce hurled the manuscript of A Portrait of the Artist into a fire. Who saved it?

The rage was over yet another publisher refusing Dubliners; the book finally appeared in New York in December 1916.

How many chapters did Joyce plan for Stephen Hero, the abandoned first draft of A Portrait?

He gave up after 25 chapters in 1907 and compressed the whole thing into the five chapters of the finished novel.

Pomes Penyeach (1927) was sold for one shilling. How many poems did that buy?

A shilling was twelve pence, so the extra poem, 'Tilly', is the baker's-dozen bonus the title jokingly promises.

Which of Joyce's family members died on Bloomsday, 16 June 1955?

He was the 'whetstone' who taught beside James at the Berlitz school and bailed him out for years; his memoir is titled My Brother's Keeper.

Who sculpted Dublin's 1990 James Joyce statue, nicknamed 'the Prick with the Stick'?

The brass figure leans on a cane a few steps from O'Connell Street and was unveiled on Bloomsday.

Which novelist, pen name Italo Svevo, was one of Joyce's English pupils and a model for Bloom?

He was one of Joyce's English pupils, a Catholic of Jewish origin who helped Joyce through writer's block on A Portrait.

In which Adriatic naval base did Joyce teach English to officers before settling in Trieste?

He loathed the town, calling it 'a naval Siberia', and finished the Dubliners story 'Clay' there.

In which city did Joyce work as a bank correspondence clerk for seven months in 1906-07?

The stay was barren but seeded 'The Dead' and the idea of Ulysses, first conceived as a short story.

Which socialist historian's anti-heroic view of history fed into the character of Leopold Bloom?

Joyce read him in depth during his Roman sojourn.

What was the name of the theatre company Joyce co-founded and managed in wartime Zurich?

It staged Wilde, Shaw and Synge; Nora acted in Riders to the Sea while Joyce sang offstage.

Which British consul sued Joyce over his pay for a role in The Importance of Being Earnest?

Joyce won the compensation case but lost his countersuit for libel in 1919.

Which Monteverdi aria was sung by tenor Max Meili at Joyce's burial in Zurich?

Only the British consul attended; Dublin's Department of External Affairs asked whether he had died a Catholic.

Which American sculptor made the seated statue beside Joyce's honour grave in Zurich?

Joyce was moved from an ordinary grave to the honour grave in 1966; Nora and Giorgio lie beside him.

Joyce's poem 'Ecce Puer' (1932) marked the birth of his grandson and the death of whom?

It appeared with Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach in the 1936 Collected Poems from the Black Sun Press.

Which US institution holds more than 10,000 pages of Joyce's working papers and his private library?

In Britain, University College London has the only major research collection of his work.