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

Alexis Léon (1925-2018) was born in Paris, the son of refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He was one of the last living members of James Joyce’s Paris circle in the author’s final decade. Anna Maria Léon married Alexis Léon in Paris in 1979 and they were happy together for forty-three years. She encouraged this project from the start and ensured that this book would be published as a fitting tribute to her late husband and his family. Luca Crispi is Associate Professor of James Joyce Studies and Modernism in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland. He co-curated the ‘Ulysses’ at the National Library exhibition in 2004–5, where he first met the Léons. He has worked with Joyce’s archives in various collections around the world for over twenty years. He is the author of Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in ‘Ulysses’: Becoming the Blooms (Oxford University Press 2015) and is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Ulysses and Shakespeare and Company.

Illustrations
Contributors

Preface
Anna Maria Léon

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1. Contexts
Luca Crispi

2. James Joyce and Paul L. Léon: The Story of a Friendship
Lucie Noel

3. The Story of the Publication of The Story of a Friendship
Luca Crispi

4 On James Joyce
Paul L. Léon

5 Paul Léon’s ‘Letters from Hell’
Transcribed, translated and annotated by Mary Gallagher

6 ‘Living Memories of James Joyce: Fifty Years On’: A Lecture at
the James Joyce Society
Alexis Léon

Select Bibliography
Index