Paralleling Homer’s Odyssey, Joyce’s Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom on his wanderings around the city of Dublin on Thursday 16 June 1904. The idea for Ulysses may have come to Joyce as early as 1906, but he didn’t start writing it until 1914. The first episode of Ulysses was published in the Little Review magazine in New York in March 1918. In London, the Egoist magazine, edited by Harriet Weaver, also attempted to publish episodes of Ulysses but quickly ran into trouble with printers who refused to print it. In New York, some issues of the Little Review were seized by the US postal authorities, and a court case in 1921 resulted in a ban on Ulysses that wasn’t lifted until 1933. The first edition of Ulysses in book form was published by Sylvia Beach, an American woman who ran the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. It was published on Joyce’s fortieth birthday, 2 February 1922.

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