James Joyce is indisputably one of the most original and influential writers of the twentieth century. His first three works - never before collected in one volume - present Joyce at his most accessible and lyrical, and exemplify his polished, beautifully expressive writing and his masterly use of English. The fifteen short stories in Dubliners (1914) create a rich and fascinating portrait of Joyce's native city. Virtually all his characters are middle-class or lower middle-class people whose lives are notable for their lack of drama. Their talk and interactions are the stuff of daily life, their concerns are ignoble, and the setting within Joyce encloses them are not the slum or the mansion, but parlors and offices and pubs. If these characters, created more than fifty years ago, strike a chord of familiarity, one reason is that their stories are imbued with the routines and frustrations of modern city life. They are not only Dubliners, but urban citizens of the twentieth century. "The Dead," the concluding story in the collection, generally acknowledged to be one of the greatest modern short stories, is based on characters and experiences close to Joyce, particularly his relationship with his wife. A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) tells the coming of age of Dubliner Stephen Dedalus. In this, his first novel, Joyce relied on personal experience, but distorted many incidents for effect, and enhanced them all with his use of language, so that it is neither autobiographical nor the typically told tale of an adolescent is crisis. Joyce used the memories and events of his childhood to explore his emotional and artistic development and explain how he slowly broke free from the narrow constraints of Irish society. Chamber Music (1907) is a collection of thirty-six lyrical love poems. Joyce intended to set them to music and they are very pleasing to the ear.
