Ulysses

James Joyce began Ulysses in Trieste around 1914 and finished it in Paris in 1921, after years of moving between cities with his partner Nora Barnacle and their two children. He was often broke, teaching English lessons and borrowing money, and his eyes were failing. He endured a string of painful operations for iritis and glaucoma, so parts of the book were written with a patch over one eye.

The novel is a single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, followed mostly through Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, a young teacher. Joyce mapped that day onto Homer's Odyssey, the ancient Greek poem about a soldier's long journey home, so each episode echoes an adventure from the older story. The date was not random. It was the day Joyce and Nora first walked out together, which turned a private anniversary into literature.

It reached readers in pieces first. The American magazine The Little Review serialized episodes from 1918, and in 1921 a New York court ruled the "Nausicaa" episode obscene, so publication there stopped and the editors were fined. No commercial publisher would touch it. Sylvia Beach, who ran the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, offered to publish it herself. The first edition appeared on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday, printed in Dijon by a printer who spoke little English while Joyce kept rewriting on the proofs. The book swelled by roughly a third during typesetting, which is one reason its text is still argued over.

Copies were smuggled into Britain and the United States, and some were seized and burned by customs. The American ban held until 1933, when Judge John M. Woolsey ruled the book was not pornographic, and Random House published it openly the next year.

Its influence spread fast. Writers took from it the idea that a whole mind could be put on the page, thought by thought, without tidying it up. Dublin now holds Bloomsday every 16 June, when readers walk Bloom's route and read the book aloud in the street.