James Joyce was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century but he was not immediately recognised as such; rather he lived in exile in the cosmopolitan Europe of the 1920s in a bid to escape the suffocating atmosphere & parochial prejudices of his native Dublin. His unstinting dedication to authorship picks him out as a writer in the romantic tradition. He battled poverty & financial dependency for much of his adult life as well as near-blindness from 1917 & the grief of his daughter Lucias mental illness. He suffered too the slings & arrows of uncomprehending critics especially for his influential Ulysses which was banned in both Britain & America. Drawing on considerable new material that has only recently become available Gordon Bowkers biography attempts to get beyond the exterior life to explore the inner landscape of an extraordinary writer who continues to fascinate & influence well over a century after his birth.