IRISH WRITERS

JAMES JOYCE(1882-1941)

Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin,on 2 February 1882. His father invested unwisely, and the family's fortunes declined steadily. Joyce graduated from University College, Dublin, in 1902; he briefly studied medicine in Paris, but his mother's impending death brought him back to Dublin.
In 1904, Joyce began Stephen Hero, which he later re-worked as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He also met Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid, and on 16 June 1904 they went walking at Ringsend, at the Liffey's mouth; Joyce later chose that date for the events recorded in Ulysses. Having briefly shared a Martello tower at Sandycove, Co Dublin, with Oliver StJohn Gogarty, he sailed from Dublin with Nora in October 1904. Joyce found work in a language school in Trieste. In 1909, he made two trips to Dublin, to arrange publication of Dubliners, and to open a short-lived cinema. His last visit was in 1912, when he failed to overcome his publisher's doubts about Dubliners. In 1914 the book was published in England, and A Portrait was serialised in a London magazine.
With the outbreak of World War I, Joyce moved to Zurich in neutral Switzerland, where in 1917 he underwent the first of many operations for glaucoma. Ulysses, his masterpiece, was serialised in New York in 1918-20, but was eventually halted by a court action.
Joyce returned to Trieste in 1919, then moved to Paris, where in 1922 Ulysses was published by Sylvia Beach, owner of a celebrated bookshop. Its portrait of Dublin, and of the Jewish advertisement canvasser Leopold Bloom, revolutionised the novel with its 'stream of consciousness' technique; it was not published in Britain until 1936. In 1923, Joyce began the almost impenetrable Finnegans Wake, which was published in 1939. Joyce and Nora finally married in 1931, and in 1940 returned to Zurich, where he died on 13 January 1941.

OSCAR WILDE(1854-1900)

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, on 16 October 1854.
His father was an eminent eye and ear specialist; his mother wrote under the pen-name 'Speranza'. They soon moved to 1 Merrion Square, where Oscar was allowed to frequent his mother's salon.
Wilde defeated Edward Carson for the foundation scholarship in classics at Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1874 won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was influenced by John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Cardinal Newman. He became a disciple of aestheticism, pursuing beauty for beauty's sake; his poem Ravenna (1878) won the Newdigate Prize.
Wilde's wit and eccentric dress attracted attention, and in 1882 he undertook a lecture tour in America, advising a customs officer that he had 'nothing to declare but my genius'. In 1884, he married Constance Lloyd, a barrister's daughter, and embarked on a literary career. His first success was The Happy Prince (1888), but his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) offended Victorian susceptibilities.
The triumph of his play Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) inaugurated his most glorious years. It was followed by A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

SAMUEL BECKETT (1906-1989)

Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, near Dublin, Ireland. He grew up in a middle class, Protestant home, the son of a quantity surveyor and a nurse, he was sent off at the age of 14 to go to the same school regularly which Oscar Wilde had gone. Looking back on his childhood, he once remarked, "I had little talent for happiness."Beckett was consistent in his loneliness. The unhappy boy soon grew into an unhappy young man, often so depressed that he stayed in bed until mid afternoon. He was difficult to engage in any lengthy conversation but the women could not resist him. The lonely young poet, however, would not allow anyone to penetrate his solitude. He once remarked, after refusing advances from James Joyce's daughter, that he was dead and had no feelings that were human.

In 1928, Samuel Beckett moved to Paris, and the city quickly won his heart. Shortly after he arrived, a mutual friend introduced him to James Joyce, and Beckett quickly became an apostle of the older writer. At the age of 23, he wrote an academi composition in defense of Joyce's magnum opus against the public's lazy demand for easy comprehensibility. A year later, he won his first literary prize. After writing a study of Proust, however, Beckett came to the conclusion that habit and routine were the "cancer of time", so he gave up his post at Trinity College and set out on a nomadic journey across Europe.

Beckett made his way through Ireland, France, England, and Germany, all the while writing poems and stories and doing estrange jobs to get by. In the course of his journies, he no doubt came into contact with many tramps and wanderers, and these friends would later translate into some of his finest characters. Whenever he happened to pass through Paris, he would call on Joyce, and they would have long visits, although it was rumored that they mostly sit in silence, both suffused with sadness.

Beckett finally estabilished down in Paris in 1937.

Beckett secured his position as a master dramatist on April 3, 1957 when his second masterpiece, Endgame, premiered (in French) at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Although English was his native language, all of Beckett's major works were originally written in French. Apparently, however, he wanted the discipline and economy of expression that an acquired language would force upon on him.

Beckett was the first of the absurdists to win international fame. His works have been translated into over twenty languages. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to write until his death in 1989, but the task grew more and more difficult with each work until, in the end, he said that each word seemed to him "an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."

Questionnaire 

1. When was Oscar Wilde born?
2. What are his most famous books?
3. What’s the address of James Joyce’s house? Can you visit it?
4. Waht's the name of the protagonist of Ulysses?
5. Can you name any of the works of Samuel Beckett?