James Joyce (pictured) is certainly not a curmudgeon, but the dreamlike, quasi-mystical nature of his work makes him a suitable subject for this page. His contemporaries considered him one of the great literary geniuses of all time but today, while no one denies his extraordinary talent for creative writing he is considered by some to be a pedantic show off. Although much of his subject matter sympathetically focuses on the common man the esoteric vocabulary and multi- layered ultra academic themes make his work inaccessable to the layman. His novels are something of a prototype of modern literature.