James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic, born to a middle-class Protestant family in Dublin, where he was raised and educated. Despite living outside of Ireland for most of his adult life, Joyce’s works focus on the social nuances and complex politics of Ireland in the early part of the 20th century. Joyce was a major contributor to Modernism, in particular the avant-garde literary movement that pushed the boundaries of literary style and form, and asked questions about the nature and purpose of literature in modern life (see below). Joyce is best known for his intimate bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and monolithic novel Ulysses (1922). Joyce’s dense stories and unorthodox techniques exemplify the social themes and intellectual developments of Modernist literature and form part of the unique literary tradition of Irish culture.

The short story collection Dubliners, in which “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” was published, is one of Joyce’s earlier works. As such, it has a more traditional Realist style than Joyce’s later, experimental Modernist works. The stories in Dubliners were conceived as a sequential set: They portray middle-class life in Dublin and pass from depictions of childhood through adulthood and maturity to old age and death.