Stephen James Joyce

Stephen James Joyce (born 15 February 1932) is the grandson of James Joyce and the controversial executor of Joyce's estate. He was born in France, the son of James Joyce's son, Giorgio, and Helen Joyce, née Kastor. Stephen attended Harvard University, graduating in 1958. At Harvard, he once roomed with Paul Matisse, grandson of French impressionist painter Henri Matisse, and with 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, live in the Île de Ré in France. They have no children; Stephen is James Joyce's sole living descendant.

Stephen Joyce and Seán Sweeney are the joint trustees of the Estate of James Joyce. He has taken an active role in all legal matters relating to Joyce's works. He has 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 2004, Stephen Joyce threatened legal action against the Irish government when the Rejoyce Dublin 2004 festival proposed public reading of excerpts of Ulysses on Bloomsday. 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. After 1995 he announced no permissions would be granted to quote from his grandfather's work. Libraries holding letters by James Joyce were unable to show them without permission. Versions of his work online were disallowed. Stephen Joyce claimed to be protecting his grandfather's and his family's reputation, but would sometimes grant permission to use material in exchange for fees that were often "extortionate".

Stephen James Joyce, however, has attracted praise. The Australian historian Edward Duyker, in the introduction (p. xviii) to his A Dictionary of Sea Quotations wrote 'I . . . wish to record my personal thanks to Stephen James Joyce, the novelist’s only living descendant, for his generosity and kindness. His respect for the beauty and integrity of James Joyce’s work, and his careful insistence that I quote from the first edition of Ulysses, led me to have the unique experience of working with copy no. 302 of the first printing – largely uncut!–of one thousand copies (Shakespeare & Co., Paris, 1922), a volume held by the State Library of New South Wales. I am also grateful to Stephen James Joyce for reminding me of the exquisite sea prose in chapter 4 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and for the pleasure of his conversation and his personal reminiscences of his grandfather. These conversations were among the special delights of this project.'

On 13 January 2011, on the 70th anniversary of James Joyce's death, all of his works entered the public domain in much of the world. In the US however, some of his work remains protected by copyright. Prior to this, in 2007, Stephen 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.

When the Central Bank of Ireland issued a ten euro James Joyce commemorative coin on 10 April 2013, Stephen Joyce described the coin and the circumstances of its issue as "one of the greatest insults to the Joyce family that has ever been perpetrated in Ireland". He complained of a lack of consultation over the coin; he objected to an error in a Joycean quotation inscribed on the coin; he was upset by the design of the portrait of the writer on the coin, calling it "the most unlikely likeness of Joyce ever produced"; and he described as highly insensitive and offensive the decision to issue the coin on the anniversary of the death of his grandmother, Nora Joyce, who died in 1951.