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.

In this landmark study of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," Luca Crispi and Sam Slote have brought together fourteen other leading Joyce experts to explore the genesis of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing works of fiction. Each essay approaches "Finnegans Wake" through novel perspectives afforded by Joyce's preparatory manuscripts. By investigating a work through its earlier drafts, genetic criticism grounds speculative interpretations in an historical, material context and opens up a broader horizon for critical and textual interpretation.
The introduction by Luca Crispi, Sam Slote, and Dirk Van Hulle offers a chronology of the composition of "Finnegans Wake," an archival survey of the manuscripts, and an introduction to genetic criticism. Then, the volume provides a chapter-by-chapter interpretation of the "Wake," probing the book as a work in progress. This book is the essential starting point for all future studies of Joyce's most complex and fascinating work.