Ulysses
James Joyce
1922
I rish author James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness masterpiece Ulysses follows a day in the lives of three characters-Stephen Detdalus, Leopold Bloom, and Bloom’s wife Molly-as they go about their business in Dublin. It draws on Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, but its characters are concerned with the nitty-gritty details of their lives, revealed through internal monologues. These include a sexually explicit 22, 000 -word soliloquy by Molly at the end of the book.
From 1918, the novel began to appear in installments in The Little Review, a US literary magazine, but when the publication’s editors were convicted of obscenity, it looked as if the work might never get published in its entirety. Eventually, Sylvia Beach, the American founder of Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop in Paris, wrote to Joyce begging the “honor of bringing out your Ulysses.” In 1922, she printed 1,000 copies, which were smuggled around the world.
In 1932, Random House in New York challenged the ban and imported a single copy. At the trial that duly followed, the judge ruled that Ulysses was not obscene, a decision that was upheld on appeal. Random House published the first legal edition of Ulysses in the US in 1934. In Britain, The Bodley Head followed suit in 1936.
