James Joyce was born in Dublin and spent much of his adult life away from Ireland. Yet Dublin never left him.

His greatest works—Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake—are filled with the streets, voices, memories, arguments, churches, pubs, families, and private thoughts of Ireland.

Joyce left Ireland as a young man, determined to make his own way as an artist. From Trieste and Paris to Zurich, he lived much of his life abroad. Still, he famously insisted that Dublin could be reconstructed from his books.

His writing changed modern literature, pushing language and consciousness into places they had rarely gone before. For all its difficulty and experimentation, the heart of Joyce's work is remarkably simple: a lifelong attempt to understand the place and people he had left behind.