James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1882. His mother was pregnant 15 times but many children did not survive. Joyce's mother died of cancer and his father worked selling lime. Joyce was a poet and his most famous novel was Ulysses, published in 1922. He died in 1941 at the age of 59. Some of his major works included Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.