Ulysses
by James Joyce
Summary
Advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom wanders through Dublin over the course of a single day in June 1904, his ordinary errands and encounters mapped in painstaking detail against the framework of Homer's Odyssey. Joyce shifts styles constantly, from interior monologue to newspaper parody to dramatic script, pushing the novel form to its formal limits while tracing Bloom's quiet decency amid the city's noise. The book is widely considered one of the most important and influential novels of the twentieth century.
Historical Context & Significance
United States customs officials banned the novel as obscene for over a decade, and no major prize committee of the era would touch a book that courts on two continents had tried to suppress. The obscenity ban was not lifted in America until a landmark 1933 court ruling allowed the novel to be published there.