James Joyce was an expatriate Irish writer and poet, and is widely considered one of the most significant writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his short story collection Dubliners, and for his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Together with Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, he is credited with the development of the stream of consciousness technique in which the same weight is given to both the internal world of the mind and the external world of events and circumstances as factors shaping the actions and views of fictional characters. His fictional universe is firmly rooted in Dublin and reflects his family life and the events and friends (and enemies) from his school and college days. In this, he became both one of the most cosmopolitan and one of the most local of all the great English language modernists.
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Today's selected anniversaries:
451 Council of Chalcedon: Bishops gathered at Chalcedon, a city of Bithynia in Asia Minor, to open the fourth ecumenical council in Christianity. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Chalcedon)
1600 San Marino, the world's oldest republic still in existence, adopted its written constitution. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Marino)
1871 Dry conditions caused two catastrophic historic fires in the U.S. Midwest: the Great Chicago Fire and Wisconsin's Peshtigo Fire. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire)
1895 Queen Min of Joseon, the last empress of Korea, was assassinated. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Min_of_Joseon)
1967 Argentine-born physician, Marxist revolutionary and Cuban guerrilla leader Che Guevara was captured in Bolivia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara)
Wikiquote of the day:
"Every human being, of whatever origin, of whatever station, deserves respect. We must each respect others even as we respect ourselves." ~ U Thant (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/U_Thant)