A century ago, on June 16, 1904, James Joyce fell in love with Nora Barnacle. When he began writing Ulysses in Zurich more than ten years later, he settled on that date as the single day in Dublin—now called Bloomsday—in which the action of the novel occurs. The first chapters were serialized in the American publication Little Review in 1918, but ceased when the work was banned in the United States in December 1920 as a result of action initiated by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Ezra Pound had invited Joyce to take up residence in Paris, where he finished the novel and found a publisher in Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Co. Ulysses is ostensibly analogous to Homer’s Odyssey: Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus, Leopold Bloom, Ulysses, and his wife, Molly Bloom, Penelope. Much can be made of the work’s Homerian connections, but it is the extraordinary depth of characterization and insight achieved through its challenging experimental form that has been the work’s most enduring contribution to modern literature.

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