James Joyce

Joyce left Dublin for good in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, the woman he'd marry decades later, and supported them for years teaching English in Trieste while writing about the city he'd abandoned. Dubliners took nine years to find a publisher willing to risk its frank details; Ulysses, serialized through the 1910s, was banned as obscene in Britain and the United States and only cleared for publication after a landmark 1933 court decision.

He wrote much of it half-blind, enduring more than two dozen eye surgeries over his lifetime. Finnegans Wake, an even more radical experiment in language, took seventeen years to finish. Fleeing occupied France for neutral Switzerland in the war's early days, he died in Zurich in 1941 after surgery for a perforated ulcer.