John Stanislaus Joyce

Obsessed with the burden of being an only son of an only son, John Joyce himself fathered 17 children with his long-suffering wife (despite many affairs and many engagements, he only married once), but was concerned only with his eldest surviving son, James. This was through no intrinsic merit on James's part but because of John Joyce's excessive belief in the rights of primogeniture. This was to such an extent that all his other children were excluded from his will, and those who predeceased him were not even named on the family gravestone. John, as James liked to claim, gave to his son all of his wit: most of the characters in "Ulysses" are barely disguised friends of his and the incidents from his life pepper James's fiction. John Joyce was also the most important person in James's life.