James Joyce

Our Examination Round His Factifiation for Incamination of Work in Progress is unique among the many books Finnegans Wake has evoked from other writers. This symposium was published in Paris ten years before Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was completed. The contributors were all friends or acquaintances of the authors: Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams.…

Stephen Hero is an early version of Joyce’s famous A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was originally rejected on grounds of indecency—so the story goes—by twenty publishers, whereupon Joyce threw the manuscript in the fire, but Mrs. Joyce rescued several unburnt portions. Although Joyce later entirely rewrote his novel of a young Irishman’s rebellion against church, country and family, this early version is beautifully composed, the mood being more discursive and personal than in A Portrait.…