James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882. He was one of a large family described by his father as 'sixteen or seventeen children'. He was educated at Clongowes Wood College and later at Belvedere College, Dublin. He did well at school, being interested in poetry, Latin, and languages. In 1898, he went to the Dublin college of the Royal University, where he studied philosophy and languages. he was interested in the theatre and in April 1900 wrote in the Fortnightly Review on Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken. In October 1902 Joyce went to Paris, but returned to Dublin in 1903 as his mother was dying. He taught at a school in Dalkey until he married in 1904, when he and his wife went to Zurich and later Trieste, where Joyce taught languages in the Berlitz school.

He returned to Dublin in 1912, when he made an unsuccessful attempt to publish Dubliners privately. He spent the First World War in Zurich with his wife and two children in great poverty, but was helped by a grant of £100 from the Privy Purse. He lived in Paris from 1920, and published in 1922 Ulysses and in 1939 Finnegans Wake. He died in January 1941.

A masterpiece of subjectivity, a fictionalized memoir, a coming-of-age prose-poem, this brilliant novella introduces Joyce's alter ego, Stephen Daedelus, the hero of Ulysses, and begins the narrative experimentation that would help change the concept of literary narrative forever. It describes Stephen's formative years in Dublin; as Stephen matures, so does the writing, until it sparkles with clarity. The style presents numerous, almost insurmountable, problems for the oral interpreter, particularly one with the limited vocal range of John Lynch. But Lynch pays no attention to the problems. Instead, he identifies so completely with Daedelus, throws himself so lustily into the book, that it is as if the passionate young artist himself is bursting out of your speakers.