Finnegans Wake

James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin in 1882. At twenty years old, Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. His writings include Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, Pomes Penyeach, and Finnegans Wake. Ulysses required seven years to complete and Finnegans Wake took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.