James Joyce and Paul L. Leon: The Story of a Friendship' Revisited

James Joyce spent the last decade of his life in Paris, struggling to finish his great final work Finnegans Wake amidst personal and financial hardship and just as Europe was being engulfed by the rising tide of fascism. Bringing together new archival discoveries and personal accounts, this book explores one of the central relationships of his final years: that with his friend, confidant and adviser Paul L. Leon. Providing first-hand accounts of Joyce''s Paris circle - which included Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov - the book makes available again the text of Lucie (Leon) Noel''s personal memoir of the relationship between her husband and the Irish writer (published as James Joyce and Paul L. Leon: The Story of Friendship in 1950), including his valiant rescue of Joyce''s Paris archives from occupying Nazi forces. The book also collects for the first time Leon''s clandestine letters to his wife from August to December 1941, chronicling his desperate state of body and mind while interned in Drancy, France''s main Nazi transit camp, and then in Compiegne, just before he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Joyce died suddenly on 13 January 1941 in Zurich and Leon was murdered by the Nazis on 4 April 1942 in Silesia. Annotated throughout with contextual commentary by Luca Crispi and Mary Gallagher, this is an essential resource for scholars of James Joyce and of the literary culture of Paris in the 1930s and first years of World War II in France.>

Product details

• Authors: Luca Crispi, Alexis Leon, Anna Maria Leon
• Assisted by: Luca Crispi (Editor), Matthew Feldman (Editor), Alexis Léon (Editor), Anna Maria Léon (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.06.2024
• EAN: 9781350351035
• ISBN: 978-1-350-35103-5
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 166 mm x 242 mm x 18 mm
• Series: Modernist Archives
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; English, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, The Holocaust, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, c 1918 to c 1939 (Inter-war period), Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, 1922–1923 (Irish Civil War period), HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / Holocaust, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form