James Joyce

(1882 - 1941)

Offered one pound per short story by the editor of a farmers’ magazine in 1904, James Joyce published three under the pseudonym Stephen Daedalus—later included in Dubliners—before the editor decided that the content was not quite right. Stephen became the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, and a main character in Ulysses, published in 1922. Once asked by a young man if he could kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses, Joyce replied, “No, it did lots of other things too.”