Episode Details

James Joyce spent his adult life fleeing Dublin while turning every piece of his art into a microscopically detailed map of it. This episode follows him from a family connected to Daniel O'Connell that slid into poverty through his father's drinking and financial disasters, a Jesuit education he could barely afford, a childhood dog attack and a lightning phobia born of an aunt's warnings about divine wrath, to the poem about Charles Stewart Parnell he wrote at nine.

We linger on 1903, when he refused to kneel and pray at his dying mother's bedside, and on 1904, the year he walked away from a singing prize rather than sight-read, met Nora Barnacle, dated Ulysses to June 16, and was rescued from a brawl by Alfred H. Hunter, a seed for Leopold Bloom. From Pola and Trieste to a miserable Roman bank job that produced The Dead and the idea for Ulysses, the episode covers the decade-long fight to publish Dubliners, Ezra Pound's intervention, the eye surgeries and lost teeth of his Paris years, Finnegans Wake as a map of the sleeping mind, and his death in Zurich in 1941.

• Why Joyce used his rigorous Jesuit training to dismantle the church's authority over his mind
• How brother Stanislaus, Nora, Italo Svevo and Pound formed the network that kept him working
• Why a Dublin publisher burned the printed sheets of Dubliners over libel fears
• What stream of consciousness in Ulysses does differently from earlier fiction
• Why Joyce asked James Stephens to finish Finnegans Wake if he went blind