James Joyce and Paul L. Léon: The Story of a Friendship Revisited

James Joyce spent the final decade of his life in Paris, struggling to finish his great final work Finnegans Wake amidst personal and financial hardship and just as Europe itself 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 confidant, friend and business 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 the Leon family’s memoir of the relationship between the two men (published James Joyce and Paul L. Leon: The Story of Friendship). The book also collects for the first time Leon’s letters to his wife in the 1940s, chronicling his desperate attempts to rescue Joyce’s Paris archives from occupying Nazi forces. While these efforts were successful, they would cost Leon his own life in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps.
Annotated throughout with contextual commentary, this is an essential resource for scholars of James Joyce and of the literary culture of World War 2.