James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. The oldest of ten children, he grew up in a family that went from prosperity to penury because of his father’s wastrel behavior. After receiving a rigorous Jesuit education, twenty-year-old Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin in 1902 to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. On one trip back to Ireland, he fell in love with the now famous Nora Barnacle on June 16, the day he later chose as “Bloomsday” in his novel Ulysses. Nora was an uneducated Galway girl who became his lifelong companion and the mother of his two children. In debt and drinking heavily, Joyce lived for 36 years on the Continent, supporting himself first by teaching jobs, then through the patronage of Mrs. Harold McCormick (Edith Rockerfeller) and the English feminist and editor Harriet Shaw Weaver. His writings include Chamber Music (1907), Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Exiles (1918), Ulysses (1922), Pomes Penyeach (1927), Finnegan's Wake (1939), and an early draft of A Portrait of a Young Man, Stephan Hero (1944). Ulysses required seven years to complete, and his masterpiece, Finnegan's Wake, took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.

Harry Levin (1912–1994), literary critic and modernist literature scholar, graduated from Harvard University and began teaching there some years later. In 1960 he became the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard and retired in 1983.

The Portable James Joyce - Edited by Harry Levin Editor's Introduction
Dubliners
Editor's Preface
The Sisters
An Encounter
Araby
Eveline
After the Race
Two Gallants
The Boarding House
A Little Cloud
Counterparts
Clay
A Painful Case
Ivy Day in the Committee Room
A Mother
Grace
The Dead
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Editor's Preface
Exiles
Editor's Preface
Collected Poems
Editor's Preface
Chamber Music, I to XXXVI
Pomes Penyeach:
Tilly
Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba
A Flower Given to My Daughter
She Weeps Over Rahoon
Tutto è Sciolto
On the Beach at Fontana
Simples
Flood
Nightpiece
Alone
A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight
Bahnhofstrasse
A Prayer

Other Poems:
The Holy Office
Gas from a Burner
Ecce Puer
FromUlysses
Editor's Preface
Nestor
Hades
The Wandering Rocks
The Sirens
Penelope
From Finnegans Wake
Editor's Preface
Here Comes Everybody
Anna Livia Plurabelle
Tales Told of Shem and Shaun

Bibliographical Note