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Ulysses100
Happy Birthday James Joyce!
Famed Irish writer James Joyce was born OTD: February 2, 1882
February 2, 2022 marks James Joyce’s 140th birthday.
Joyce is known for his incredibly influential and experimental literary works, Ulysses (published 100 years ago on Joyce’s fortieth birthday, 1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). He is also the author of a semi-autobiographical novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916), a damning realist portrait of turn-of-the-century Dublin and its inhabitants (Dubliners, 1914), poetry (published in Chamber Music, 1907, Poems Pennyeach, 1927, and Collected Poems, 1936), a play (Exiles, 1918), and many now-famous letters, essays, and works of criticism.
In addition to being James Joyce’s birthday and the anniversary of Ulysses’s publication, February 2 is also the Christian holiday of Candlemas, celebrating the first presentation of the infant Jesus at Temple, 40 days after his birth. The first Groundhog Day was observed in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, on February 2, 1887, the year before Joyce’s birth. I suspect that Joyce enjoyed the coincidence of his birthday being the day a small woodland creature gets to determine when Spring is coming each year, if he was aware of the holiday.
