Stephen James Joyce

Stephen James Joyce (15 February 1932 – 23 January 2020) was the grandson of James Joyce and the executor of Joyce's literary estate.

Biography

Joyce was born in Paris, France, the son of James Joyce's son, Giorgio Joyce, and Helen Joyce (née Kastor). Joyce graduated in 1958 from Harvard University, where he once roomed with Paul Matisse, the grandson of French impressionist painter Henri Matisse, and with Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan.

Thereafter, he worked for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on African development. He retired from the OECD in 1991 to focus on managing his grandfather's estate. He and his wife, Solange Raythchine Joyce, lived in the Île de Ré in France. They had no children. With Joyce's death, James Joyce has no living descendants.

Work with the James Joyce estate

Joyce and Seán Sweeney were the joint trustees of the Estate of James Joyce. As a trustee, he brought numerous lawsuits or threats of legal action against scholars, biographers, and artists attempting to quote from Joyce's literary work or personal correspondence. In 1988, he destroyed a collection of letters written by Lucia Joyce, his aunt.

In 1989, he forced Brenda Maddox to delete a postscript concerning Lucia from her biography, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom.

On 1 January 2012, 70 calendar years after James Joyce's death, all of his works entered the public domain "On New Year's Eve [December 31, 2011], the Twitter feed of UbuWeb ... posted a link to an article in The Irish Times about the expiry of European copyright on the work of James Joyce. The link was accompanied by a curt message to Joyce's grandson and sole living descendant: "Fuck you, Stephen Joyce. EU copyright on James Joyce's works ends at midnight." Prior to this, in 2007, Joyce's hold on the estate had already been delimited by a fair use suit brought by Carol Loeb Schloss and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society's Fair Use Project.

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