The Portable James Joyce, edited and with an introduction by Harry Levin, includes four of the six books on which Joyce's astonishing reputatuion is founded: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man; his Collected Poems (including Chamber Music); Exiles, Joyce's only drama; and his volume of short stories, Dubliners. In addition, there is a generous sampling from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, including the famous " Anna Livia Plurabelle" episode.

James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. The oldest of ten children, he grew up in a family that went from prosperity to penury because of his father’s wastrel behavior. After receiving a rigorous Jesuit education, twenty-year-old Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin in 1902 to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. On one trip back to Ireland, he fell in love with the now famous Nora Barnacle on June 16, the day he later chose as “Bloomsday” in his novel Ulysses. Nora was an uneducated Galway girl who became his lifelong companion and the mother of his two children. In debt and drinking heavily, Joyce lived for 36 years on the Continent, supporting himself first by teaching jobs, then through the patronage of Mrs. Harold McCormick (Edith Rockerfeller) and the English feminist and editor Harriet Shaw Weaver. His writings include Chamber Music (1907), Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Exiles (1918), Ulysses (1922), Pomes Penyeach (1927), Finnegan's Wake (1939), and an early draft of A Portrait of a Young Man, Stephan Hero (1944). Ulysses required seven years to complete, and his masterpiece, Finnegan's Wake, took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.

Harry Levin (1912–1994), literary critic and modernist literature scholar, graduated from Harvard University and began teaching there some years later. In 1960 he became the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard and retired in 1983.