Thoughtcast®

Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin,Texas. James Joyce was born and raised in Dublin, and it was from Dublin he fled as a young man, to Trieste, in order to write Ulysses, perhaps the key novel of the early 20th century. But before he left, he began to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which, as most of us will remember, is a rite of passage not only for its main character, the sensitive, acute Stephen Dedalus (the alter ego for Joyce himself), but also for the impressed and impressionable reader. When I asked the scholar, bookseller and editor Maurice Earls to pick a piece of writing to discuss that's had a tremendous impact on him, it was this novel that he chose. Himself a Dubliner, Earls is joint editor of the Dublin Review of Books. Of special interest to ThoughtCast listeners, he's also penned an essay on Helen Vendler's Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Just hours before an author event was to take place in his small, singular independe