John Stanislaus Joyce

James Joyce often remarked that his wit, gift for storytelling, and many of his characters came from his outrageous father, John Stanislaus Joyce. In this biography, Joyce scholars John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello show us John Joyce as we've never seen him before - a formidable father, storyteller, drinker, and patriot who held a profound place in the imagination of his first surviving son. John Stanislaus Joyce was the hero of his own epic. An only son of an only son, and himself the father of at least sixteen children, he was an extraordinary patriarch and a quintessential Dubliner who can be found, as Jackson and Costello persuasively trace, on the pages of Ulysses, Dubliners, and the rest of the James Joyce canon.