Ulysses

It took seven years and three cities — Trieste, Zurich, Paris — to write one Dublin day: June 16, 1904, followed through Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom in a different style per episode. The Little Review began serializing it in New York in 1918 and was convicted of obscenity in 1921 for the Nausicaa episode; every commercial publisher in the English-speaking world promptly backed away from the greatest novel of the century.

A bookseller saved it. Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company — a lending library, not a publishing house — offered to bring it out herself, took subscriptions from half of literary Europe, and drove Maurice Darantiere's printers in Dijon through Joyce's endless proof revisions, delivering the first two copies on the author's fortieth birthday: February 2, 1922, a thousand numbered copies in Greek-flag blue. It is the most famous act of literary patronage of the century, and it nearly bankrupted her shop.

For eleven years the book lived as contraband — copies seized and burned by postal authorities, pirated in America by Samuel Roth over the signed protest of the world's writers — until Judge Woolsey's 1933 decision admitted it to the United States and Random House published it legally in 1934, an edition from which Beach, who had given everything, saw essentially nothing. The scandal faded; the book remained; June 16 is now celebrated annually on several continents, which is not bad for a day on which nothing much happens.

One Dublin day — June 16, 1904 — carried by two men. Stephen Dedalus, poet without poems, teaches a morning history class, quarrels with his roommate Buck Mulligan in their seaside tower, and walks the city grieving a mother at whose deathbed he refused to kneel. Leopold Bloom, advertising canvasser, cooks a pork kidney, attends the funeral of an acquaintance, works the newspaper office, lunches on a cheese sandwich and burgundy, and carries all day the knowledge he cannot act on: at four o'clock, his wife Molly will receive her concert manager, Blazes Boylan, and not for rehearsal.

The day expands into an epic by method: every episode shadows an adventure of Homer's Odyssey and adopts a different style — the newspaper chapter runs on headlines, the music chapter on fugue, the maternity-hospital chapter recapitulates the whole history of English prose, and in a nationalist pub a one-eyed 'citizen' provides the Cyclops to Bloom's Ulysses, who answers bigotry with the book's quiet credo and escapes as the biscuit tin flies. Father in search of a son, son in search of a father, the two orbits tighten all day toward their meeting.