Thinkers Timeline

James Joyce was an Irish writer. He is seen as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century. He was born in 1882 in Dublin, the capital of Ireland. He died in 1941 in Zurich, Switzerland. Joyce grew up in a large family. His father was charming but bad with money, and the family slowly became poorer. Joyce was clever and well educated, first by Jesuit priests and then at university in Dublin. He loved languages and learned several. As a young man, Joyce left Ireland. He felt the country was too narrow for him, and too controlled by the Catholic Church and by politics. He spent most of his life abroad, in cities such as Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. He often had little money and worked partly as a language teacher. Yet Joyce almost always wrote about Dublin. He wrote about the city and its people in great, exact detail, even from far away. His main works are a story collection, 'Dubliners', a novel called 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', and two long, difficult, famous novels: 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake'. His eyesight was poor for much of his life, and he wrote through real physical struggle.

Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest English-language poets of the late twentieth century. He was born on 13 April 1939 at a farmhouse called Mossbawn, near Castledawson in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He was the eldest of nine children in a Catholic farming family. The family later moved to nearby Bellaghy. He grew up in a divided society. Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom but had a large Catholic minority who often felt unequal. The 'Troubles', a long period of violence between Catholics and Protestants, would later shape his work. As a clever child, he won a scholarship at age 12 to St Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry. He then studied English at Queen's University Belfast. His younger brother Christopher died at the age of four after being hit by a car. Heaney was 14. He later wrote one of his most loved poems, 'Mid-Term Break', about coming home for the funeral. He published his first major book of poems, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966. It won prizes and made him famous. He continued to write for almost fifty years, producing twelve major collections plus translations. He taught at universities in Belfast, Dublin, Harvard, and Oxford. He married Marie Devlin in 1965; they had three children. He died on 30 August 2013, aged 74. His last words, sent by text to his wife in Latin, were 'Noli timere': do not be afraid.