Joyce's method of stream of consciousness,literary allusions and free dream associations was pushed to the limit in Finnegans Wake, which abandoned all conventions of plot and character construction and is written in a peculiar and obscure language, based mainly on complex multi-level puns. This approach is similar to, but far more extensive than that used by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882 – 1941) was an Irish expatriate author of the 20th century. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

Although he spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and fictional universe is firmly rooted in his native Dublin, the city which provides the settings and much of the subject matter for all his fiction.

In particular, his tempestuous early relationship with the Irish Roman Catholic Church is reflected through a similar inner conflict in his recurrent alter ego Stephen Dedalus.

As the result of his minute attentiveness to a personal locale and his self-imposed exile and influence throughout Europe, notably in Paris, Joyce became paradoxically oneof the most cosmopolitan yet one of the most regionally-focused of all the English language writers of his time.

He fled to Zürich in late 1940, after the Nazi occupation of France. In January 1941, he underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer. While at first improved, he relapsed the following day, and despite several transfusions, fell into a coma and died.

Source - Wikipedia