Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. He was the eldest child of John Stanislaus and Mary Jane Murray Joyce, who had, according to Joyce's father, "sixteen or seventeen children." Joyce's upbringing and education had much in common with that of the fictional Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce's parents were devout Catholics, and they sent him to Clongowes Wood College, a Catholic boarding school in County Kildare, south of Dublin. Run by the Jesuit order, this was considered the best Catholic school in Ireland. However, Joyce was taken out of Clongowes Wood a few years later when his father suffered some financial losses and the family's standard of living declined. After his family moved to Dublin, Joyce enrolled at Belvedere College, a Jesuit day school, where he was especially interested in poetry and languages.

By the time...