James Joyce’s Juicy Sex Letters to His Wife Nora Barnacle

In 2004, one letter sold for £240,800

James Joyce by Alex Ehrenzweig (1915) on Wikimedia Commons and Westmoreland Street in Dublin (before 1916) from National Library of Ireland on The Commons, both in the public domain and altered by the author

How could the guy who changed the course of 20th-century literature write porn so well?

James Joyce defined modernism. He experimented with language, symbolism, and style. In Ulysses (1922), he established parallels with Homer’s Odyssey. He even played with the interior monologue and invented new words.

In Finnegans Wake (1939), he mixed reality with a dream world. In Dubliners (1914), he transformed the plot and characterization. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), he described his own intellectual development as if it happened to someone else. It was all revolutionary new.

But this?

“It was the dirtiest f**king I ever gave you, darling. My p*ick was stuck up in you for hours, f**king in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty bu**ocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes…”

Born in a Catholic family as the eldest of ten surviving siblings, he grew up as a bookworm. Nothing indicated this long-sighted frail character could write love letters full of pornographic elements and coprophilia.

Still, they are more than the ramblings of a horny husband.