James Joyce is born

Novelist James Joyce is born this day in Dublin, Ireland, the eldest of 10 children. Joyce struggled with serious eye problems, undergoing 25 operations for various troubles between 1917 and 1930. In 1818, the American journal 'Little Review' began to serialize 'Ulysses', Joyce's revolutionary stream-of-consciousness novel. However, the U.S. Post Office stopped the publication's distribution in December of that year on the grounds that the novel was obscene. Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, published the novel herself in 1922, but it was banned in the United Kingdom and in the United States until 1933. Joyce's last novel, 'Finnegan's Wake' was published in 1939, and Joyce died two years later.