The most famous day in literature is June 16, 1904, when a certain Mr. Leopold Bloom of Dublin eats a kidney for breakfast, attends a funeral, admires a girl on the beach, contemplates his wife’s imminent adultery, and, late at night, befriends a drunken young poet in the city’s red-light district.
An earthy story, a virtuoso technical display, and a literary revolution all rolled into one, James Joyce’s Ulysses is a touchstone of our modernity and one of the towering achievements of the human mind.
Author
James Joyce
James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin in 1882. At twenty years old, Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. His writings include Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, Pomes Penyeach, and Finnegans Wake. Ulysses required seven years to complete and Finnegans Wake took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.
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