James Joyce is one of the most celebrated and influential English-language writers of the twentieth century, and his later works of fiction, Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), are generally regarded among the most challenging (and, for many, rewarding) works of literature produced in any language. All of his fictional writing drew somehow upon the circumstances of his own life, and, despite a self-imposed exile that lasted most of his adult life, his fiction always took place in the city of his birth, Dublin. In fact, Joyce has rendered Dublin so powerfully on his pages that generations of readers have been drawn to the city to experience a place they have already, in a sense, come to know.

Joyce was born in the south Dublin suburb of Rathgar, on February 2, 1882, the eldest of ten children born to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane (Murray) Joyce. At...