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| Dust jacket art from James Joyce: A Life by Gabrielle Carey. |
A big new book related to Joyce was published this year and was received well among the critics and fans alike. The book is actually the story of Joyce's most famous biographer, it's called Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker (2025) written by Zachary Leader, who has previously written literary biographies of Saul Bellow and Kingsley Amis. Leader's study of how Richard Ellmann's 1959 biography of Joyce set the standard for greatness in the form of literary biography was recently praised in reviews such as this one from Seamus Perry in the London Review of Books (you can read some interesting letters in reply to that review, too). I will check out Leader's book at some point. Reading Ellmann's big 960-page cinderblock years ago was pivotal for me in my initial pursuit of learning more about Joyce's life. Since then I've read several other biographies of Joyce. I really liked Gordon Bowker's James Joyce: A New Biography (2011), a very detailed walkthrough of Joyce's itinerant life, I found it useful in some of my recent writings and research.
Among the shorter biographies of Joyce (under 200 pages) I'd like to recommend a few that I read in the past year:
James Joyce: Critical Lives Series (Reaktion Books, 2006) by Andrew Gibson
A very rewarding and informative read. The author Andrew Gibson, who also wrote the book Joyce's Revenge (2002), delivers a fresh approach to documenting Joyce's life which emphasizes the Irishness of Joyce's entire project. This entry in the "Critical Lives" series starts off by stating that the indispensable efforts of scholars like Ellmann, with his gigantic collection of biographical details, and Hugh Kenner with his showcase of the vast multiverse of international, infinitely theoretical Joyce, have taken our knowledge of Joyce extremely far, but Gibson positions his approach by declaring those prior works of Joycean scholarship had not adequately emphasized the why of Joyce's mission nor how entirely Ireland-focused his artistic project was. What if Joyce's whole mission was based on celebrating his home city and fulfilling the destiny of the traditional exiled Irish monk crafting one intricate labyrinthine codex after another? Gibson emphasizes that while Joyce has become a global phenomenon celebrated for aspects of universal inclusivity and coexistence of many ideas, approaches, backgrounds, etc, his work can also be said to always "everywhere be addressing Irish themes and Irish questions." (p. 16) I found myself agreeing with Gibson's assertions and arguments. As I've said before, in my experience nothing sheds more light on Joyce's major works than visiting and learning about Ireland.
What I really appreciated (and what makes me very intrigued to read more of Andrew Gibson's work) was his insightful attention to the nuances and complexities of Joyce's relationship to his home country during the last few decades of his life. Those years (mid-1910s to the late 1930s), Joyce's most productive stretch as a writer, coincided with violent and highly significant events in the history of Ireland and the Irish War for Independence, and Joyce remained an exile from his home country until his death. The question of Joyce's politics is complex, as Gibson notes, because while he seemed to harbor the hopes of a united independent Ireland free of British rule, he was not exactly a supporter of the Irish nationalist movement of the time, and tended to stray away from their extremes. There is a far more detailed and clearly explained analysis of the concurrence of the birth of the Irish Free State (1922-1937) and Joyce's literary career in Gibson's book. You should read it. It's as informed and fresh of a take on the biography of Joyce as you can find anywhere, packed into an approachable short volume.
James Joyce: A Life (Penguin, 1999) by Edna O'Brien
This biography of Joyce from the Irish novelist Edna O'Brien is substantive and well-written. Edna O'Brien was first inspired to be a writer when she initially encountered Joyce's work. In her take on Joyce's biography, she seems to have a knack for capturing the humanity of Joyce the person. She seemed to get him. In this short book she covers the main highlights of Joyce's life seemingly without leaving much out, while also touching on many of the figures in Joyce's circle who were important catalysts in bringing his creations to the public (especially women like Sylvia Beach, Harriet Weaver, Maria Jolas, etc). But what stood out to me about this book was how O'Brien touches on certain intimate details that reveal much. Little things like how, in the depths of his blindness and eye troubles, Joyce would identify guests to his home by their voice. Or how in love he was with his wife Nora, a country girl from the west of Ireland, like Edna O'Brien was. If you wanted to read a concise, entertaining biography of Joyce which covers the main points without getting too bogged down in history, politics, or interpretive theories, this thoughtful portrait from an Irish novelist would be a safe bet.
James Joyce: A Life (Arden, 2023) by Gabrielle Carey
This artistic, poetic, whimsical walkthrough of Joyce's life is a very entertaining and enjoyable book in a slim volume. A perfect example of why it is useful to have different approaches to the task of documenting the life of an artist like Joyce. The art of biography is like the art of translation, you can take the basic structure and key details then run with it in a creative way, kinda like doing a cover of a song. This author, Gabrielle Carey, hosts a Finnegans Wake reading group in Australia, so she's got the perspective of one who has been deeply engaged with Joyce's quirkiest text while incorporating the perspectives of others. It's a fun book, with plenty of detail despite being fairly short (140 pgs), including some facts and details you won't find in the books mentioned above (for example, she talks about the medicinal effects of reading Finnegans Wake, and notes the TikTok trend that was going around of people talking about reading Finnegans Wake helping them with mental health struggles). Short chapters, no chunky paragraphs, terse sentences, often quoting from Joyce's texts or his letters without getting too caught up in the details of citations, the book takes a "bower bird approach" as the author describes it. I think it's a very worthwhile and fun read and, honestly, it's the type of book I wish I had written.
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A couple other books I've been reading which I haven't finished yet, but which deserve to be mentioned here. I've been focusing on biographical studies of Joyce's life, these other books are in the realm of Joyce's afterlives.
Straight Outta Dublin: James Joyce and Robert Anton Wilson (2025) by Eric Wagner & R. Michael Johnson
This book examines the influence of the works of Joyce on the work of the Robert Anton Wilson, especially focusing on Finnegans Wake. The author Eric Wagner has been hosting Finnegans Wake reading groups for many years and has previously written a guide to the works of Robert Anton Wilson. Here, in a fragmented and digressive approach drawing from a wide array of disciplines, Wagner indulges in in-depth discussions of the Wake, drawing on the insights of John Bishop, Hugh Kenner, Joseph Campbell, while also venturing into other modernists like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and thinkers like Alfred Korzybski and Wilhelm Reich. In the latter half of the book, R. Michael Johnson (otherwise known as the OG, author of a great substack) provides a detailed survey of the Joyce elements that appear across all of RAW's books.
Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson (2024) by Gabriel Kennedy
A perfect supplement to the above is this recent biography of Robert Anton Wilson, going through the interesting and at times harrowing life of the countercultural author. From a young man in Brooklyn during the jazz era in the 1950s, to being involved in Civil Rights protests as a teenager, working odd jobs before trying to be a full-time writer and raise a family. I like that the book even had a list of RAW's known addresses in the back, including his multi-year sojourn in Dublin in the footsteps of Joyce, and then his later years in Santa Cruz where for many years he hosted a Finnegans Wake reading group.
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As a bonus, here's one more notable book I've just started reading but haven't gotten very far with yet. It's a unique text called Peripatet (2019) by Grant Maierhofer, with typographical experiments in the vein of Quentin Fiore's work on Marshall McLuhan's books. A deliberately weird and obscure, very intriguing book, it is on one level a document of the author's exploration of Finnegans Wake. As Maierhofer has written, "I read Finnegans Wake... as an ode to forms, forms explored by Joyce himself and referenced throughout the text; forms shattered and rendered useless to traditional interpretive means by intuitive, heartily experimental—almost spiritually so—pages of linguistic forest fires simultaneously enacting and subverting their own interpretation... "
You can read more about the author's approach to reading Finnegans Wake here.
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Have you read any of these books yet? What did you think? Let me know in in the comments.
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