Exploring Richard Ellmann's Biography of James Joyce

Joyce, who had been dead for 18 years, vividly inhabited its chapters, getting drunk, going blind, spending money, spiting enemies, cogitating, and, of course, creating a series of works that immediately made literary history.

Moving briskly across the first half of the 20th century (not just a single day in Dublin), Ellmann spun a tale about the formation of a writer whose name could be mentioned in the same breath as Homer’s wit