SOURCE: "The Backgrounds of 'The Dead,'" in The Kenyon Review, Vol. XX, No. 4, Autumn, 1958, pp. 507-28.

In the following essay, Ellmann uses biographical details to illuminate Joyce's highly autobiographical approach to "The Dead. "

Works of Art begin before the writers who create them are born; they cling to their childhood and pierce their maturity. To write seems to be unable not to write. As the pressure of hints, sudden insights, and old memories rises in the mind, the artist, like King Midas' barber, is compelled to speech.

"The Dead" is a story with such a long waiting history, depending as it does upon two generations of Joyces. But its immediate gestation began in Galway, Ireland, in 1903. A young woman there named Nora Barnacle used to walk out with a handsome, black-haired young man called Sonny Bodkin—his real name was Michael Bodkin. His father had a candy...