Bloomsday in Dublin
James Joyce was born in no.41 Brighton Square on 2 February 1882. His father John Stanislaus Joyce was from Cork and his mother Mary Jane Murray was from County Longford.
James as a young man was to know nine more addresses in Dublin due to the regular inebriation of his father before he struck out on his own. Some of Joyce's great novels include "Ulysses", "Dubliners" and "Finnegan's Wake". It is reputed all the house moving helped to steep Joyce in the geography of Dublin, a necessary prerequisite for the topographical descriptions that were to follow his novels titles. Joyce began his self-imposed exile in 1904 when he travelled to Trieste and Paris. On the outbreak of the Second World War he left France for Zurich where he died in 1941.
He has become a literary icon throughout the world and the annual Bloomsday Festival held on June 16 is an extraordinary day. On that day in 1904, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom each took their epic journeys through Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses, the world's most highly acclaimed modern novel.The celebrations usually include readings as well as staged re-enactments and street-side improvisations of scenes from the story. Nowhere is Bloomsday more exuberant than Dublin, home of James Joyce himself. Here, the art of Ulysses becomes the daily life of hundreds of Dubliners and the city's visitors as they retrace the odyssey each year. 2004 sees a huge festival planned with Joyceian scholars from around the globe expected in Dublin to read and discuss the great works of James Joyce.