James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882 - 1941) was an Irish writer recognized worldwide as one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th century, acclaimed for his masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), and for his controversial later novel, Finnegans Wake (1939). His series of short stories entitled Dubliners (1914) and his semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) have also been highly appreciated. Joyce is an outstanding representative of the avant-garde literary current known as Anglo-Saxon modernism, together with authors such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound or Wallace Stevens.