JAMES JOYCE: The Years of Growth, 1882-1915

This first biography of James Joyce in more than a generation will serve as an important supplement to Richard Ellmann's famous study, focusing as it does on Joyce's Irish background and that of his family. Using recently discovered or previously overlooked sources, Peter Costello sheds new light on his subject while bringing Joyce - with both his flaws and his genius - to life in a vivid and memorable manner.
The theme of Costello's biography is the theme of all Joyce's work - the transformation of raw life into art. There are few writers whose early memories proved to be so rich a mine for the creative imagination that infused their work. In his fiction, Joyce's genius used the lives of the people close to him in Dublin at the turn of the century - their loves, their feuds, and their struggles to overcome hardship - to create the stories of his work. Costello has unearthed many real-life models for so much of what Joyce was to write in later years - John Casey, Emma Cleary, the Misses Morkan, and many others. Among Costello's most fascinating revelations is the discovery that one of the most famous characters in twentieth-century fiction, Leopold Bloom, derives not from a Jew but from a Belfast Presbyterian.
Costello's intimate knowledge of the city of Dublin - its culture, history, and politics - allows him to place Joyce's actions, writings, and convictions in their natural setting and to show Joyce, surprisingly, as an Irish cultural nationalist with very firm views about his country's struggle for independence.
With its startling revelations, James Joyce: The Years of Growth 1882-1915 interweaves the many strands of person, place, and time to create a brilliant new portrait of Joyce, the artist and the man. It is a major achievement, essential to our understanding of this towering figure of twentieth-century literature.