Dubliners (Macmillan Collector's Library)

Description

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. 'There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.' From a child coming to terms with the death of a priest to a young woman torn between leading an uneventful life in Dublin and fleeing Ireland with her lover, these fifteen stories bring to life the day-to-day existence of ordinary Dubliners in the early years of the twentieth century. With brutal realism, Joyce lays bare the struggles and desires of the Irish middle classes in a compelling and unique exploration of human experience. Completed in 1905, Dubliners was published nine years later, thanks to the author's persistence. It was the first of Joyce's novels to portray his home city, and is a seminal work by one of the most influential authors of the modern era.

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James Joyce's classic collection of short stories

Author description

James Joyce was born in 1882. He came from a reasonably wealthy Dublin family which, predominantly because of Joyce's father John, was soon plunged into financial hardship. The young Joyce attended Clongowes College, Belvedere College and, eventually, University College, Dublin. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, and eloped with her to Croatia. From this point on, Joyce lived as an exile, moving from Trieste to Rome, and then to Zurich and Paris. His major works are Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). He died in 1941, by which time he had come to be regarded as one of the world's greatest novelists.