Joyce’s classmates started the magazine St. Stephen’s during his senior year at University College, then part of the Royal University of Ireland. Though independently run, the publication was at the mercy of administrative oversight. Joyce’s submissions of poems, stories, and essays were rejected by the editors or censored by school authorities, with the exception of a piece on the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan (1803–1849). In the essay, Joyce writes, “The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life—the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet is intense—the life of Blake or of Dante—taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.”

Joyce became interested in contemporary drama while at university. He praised naturalist plays for their acceptance of life “as we see it,” and people “as we meet them.” The Irish Literary Theatre, spearheaded by the writers W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, was by then exclusively devoted to Irish plays. Joyce’s essay “The Day of the Rabblement” disparaged the project for its lack of cosmopolitanism. One pronouncement points to his life’s trajectory: “A nation which never advanced so far as a miracle-play affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad.” When his school’s magazine refused to print the essay, Joyce and Francis Skeffington, whose submission had also been rejected, self-published this pamphlet.

In the years immediately following Joyce’s graduation, his poems began to appear in English and Irish publications, such as the Venture and Dana. Joyce had hoped that Dana would instead accept a piece of prose titled “A Portrait of the Artist.” He reportedly cornered the magazine’s coeditor John Eglinton at his day job at the National Library and stood by while Eglinton read the piece. Eglinton recollected that he passed it back to Joyce, saying it was “incomprehensible.” According to Joyce, the Dana editors had admired the style but could not abide the references to sex. Both Dana and a supercilious librarian named John Eglinton appear in Ulysses.

Joyce composed The Holy Office shortly before he left Dublin in fall 1904. Titled after the Catholic organization that ruled on matters of heresy, the poem attacks the Irish literati— including several writers who encouraged Joyce in his career, such as W. B. Yeats and George Moore. When nobody would print The Holy Office, Joyce self-published it as a broadside, but he could not afford to pick it up before leaving Ireland. The printers eventually destroyed the sheets. After settling in Trieste in 1905, Joyce printed one hundred copies at the city’s most famous stationer. He sent half the edition to his brother Stanislaus in Dublin, instructing him to distribute the broadside to specific friends and writers, some of whom Joyce targeted in the poem.

There is a young boy named Joyce, who may do something.
He is proud as Lucifer and writes verses perfect in their technique.
—George Russell

The influential critic and poet Arthur Symons met Joyce in 1902. Like other well-known writers, such as W. B. Yeats and George Russell, Symons praised Joyce’s poetry for its beauty and audacity. Eager to assist, Symons sent Joyce’s Chamber Music manuscript to many publishers, though all of them turned it down. By the time Elkin Mathews agreed to print the book, Joyce was more invested in writing fiction. His brother Stanislaus sequenced the poems, though Joyce later claimed he had devised the order himself as a carefully constructed piece of music.

This letter to Adolph Mann (1874–1941)—one of many composers to set Joyce’s poems to music—dates from 1910. Joyce’s musicality (he had pondered a career as a singer) is reflected in his brief, though nuanced, evaluation of Mann’s composition. As the letter indicates, Joyce is much more interested in the proofs he is revising for the imminent publication of Dubliners, a book of short stories. His optimism about Dubliners would soon vanish. The process of publishing it would be drawn out for four more years, primarily because Joyce would not consent to editors’ and printers’ demands for changes.

Joyce was visiting Ireland when a second publisher reneged on their agreement to bring out Dubliners. The printer pulped the book, anticipating charges of libel and obscenity. Joyce responded with this satiric poem, which he later self-published as a broadside. The narrator, a printer-publisher, traces his shifting reactions to Joyce’s short stories: from initial neutrality to recoil upon seeing the work typeset, followed by patriotic self-righteousness and fear for his soul if he were to print actual placenames in Dublin. The narrator decides to burn the edition and, as a penance, to have his buttocks anointed with Dubliners’ ashes.

After the book’s destruction, a distraught Joyce had visited his father, whose advice was to “buck up, take back the [manuscript] and find another publisher.” Joyce left Ireland that night and never saw his father or homeland again.

Joyce sought to explore every area of human activity in Ulysses. The reader is privy to Leopold Bloom’s thoughts as his mind wanders from subject to subject—and as he masturbates and even farts. Joyce was brought up in a society that was predominantly Catholic and, in its attitudes toward sex, fiercely Victorian and prudish. To write graphically about sex was to break a great taboo, and it was Ulysses’ sexual content that caused the book to be banned in the United States and United Kingdom. In a letter on view to Nora Barnacle, we see Joyce, open about his desires, as daring in his private correspondence as he is in his art.

When Joyce taught English at the Berlitz School in Trieste, one of his pupils was an older Jewish industrialist named Ettore Schmitz, who published under the name Italo Svevo. He became one of Joyce’s closest friends in the city and a source for the main character in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. Svevo, like Bloom, married a Gentile and had what Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann called “an amiably ironic view of life.” Joyce encouraged his student to persevere as a writer. Svevo’s best-known book, La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience), was published one year after Ulysses. In a 1927 lecture, translated later by Joyce’s brother, Svevo describes the feeling among Triestines “that [Joyce] belonged in a certain sense to us.”

Joyce was superstitious about Greece, believing that its citizens (“from noblemen down to onionsellers”) brought him good fortune—so much so, that it would affect Ulysses' book design. Count Francesco Sordina, a Greek aristocrat living in Trieste, enrolled in one of Joyce’s first English classes, elevating his instructor’s standing at the school by recommending the course to other wealthy Triestines. Their friendship endured. After World War One began, Sordina and another nobleman helped Joyce and his family emigrate to Zurich. The author memorialized the day they entered Switzerland by inscribing this book to Sordina: “in gratitude and friendship and in remembrance of 21 June 1915.”

Sexual jealousy and infidelity, themes dramatized in Ulysses, are also portrayed in the play Exiles, Joyce’s least successful work. For years he tried to interest theatrical companies in England, Ireland, and America; there were no takers until August 1919, when Exiles was staged in a German translation in Munich. Joyce summed up the world premiere: “Complete fiasco. Row in theatre. Play withdrawn. Author invited but not present. . . . Thank God.” Exiles was finally performed in English in 1925, at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse.

This rare broadside program relates to an amateur production mounted the following year by notable figures in the burgeoning gay rights and Little Theatre movements in Boston and Provincetown: Prescott Townsend (1894–1973) and Catherine Sargent Huntington (1887–1987), the play's director. The Boston Stage Society’s repertoire in the 1920s featured European plays by Strindberg, Chekhov, Jean Cocteau, and more obscure modern dramatists. Joyce may not have been aware of this production, nor was he likely compensated.

Joyce’s 1903 poem “I Hear an Army” was admired by Irish writer W. B. Yeats, who called it “a technical and emotional masterpiece.” When the poem reappeared in an anthology a decade later, Yeats recommended it to the American poet Ezra Pound. Shown here is Pound’s letter of introduction to Joyce. Before Joyce could answer, Pound wrote again to ask if he could include “I Hear an Army” in the first anthology of Imagist poetry, initially published as a special issue of the American magazine the Glebe. His compliments emboldened Joyce to send Pound Dubliners and the first chapter of his new novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Within a month, thanks to Pound, the serialization of Portrait commenced in the English literary magazine The Egoist.

“When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.
You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
–James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Harriet Shaw Weaver, who took over the editorial reins of the Egoist shortly after Portrait's first excerpts appeared, confronted resistance from the magazine's printers over subsequent extracts from the novel. Similar to the opposition provoked by Dubliners, some of the language and subject matter in Portrait was viewed as unconventional by pressmen and potentially obscene. Weaver, dedicated to publishing Joyce's text exactly as he had written it, had to fire several of her magazine’s printers for their censoring of words such as “ballocks” and references to bodily functions. Those redactions were made after the printers had produced faithful type settings, however, which allowed the New York publisher B. W. Huebsch to restore the language for the book’s first edition in 1916. Weaver started the imprint Egoist Ltd. in order to publish Portrait in England. Although British printers persisted in their unwillingness to involve themselves in Joyce’s controversial work, Weaver was able to issue her edition by binding sheets that had been printed in America.

In Ulysses Molly Bloom, the wife of Leopold, comes to life mainly in her husband’s thoughts. Throughout the day he contemplates her affair with a man called Blazes Boylan. Much more than an object of desire and jealousy, however, Molly is also the character who gets the last word. In the book’s final episode, “Penelope,” Molly is not merely breathless but also eloquent, not merely sexually frank but also an engaging narrator and storyteller. Studying Molly’s soliloquy alongside a 1904 letter on view in the gallery from Nora Barnacle to Joyce, one notices a similar lack of punctuation, the sense of pure voice unmediated by irony or craft or literary artifice.

Joyce in exile relied on this residential and commercial directory of Dublin from 1904 to render the intricate urban fabric of Ulysses, which is set that same year. Published annually, Thom’s offers a wide range of information about Dublin, from hackney cab fares to racing calendars and listings of doctors. It contains a detailed street-by-street directory of the city as well as a large folding map. Joyce mined Thom’s for details to include in Ulysses, presenting Dublin with uncanny topographical and historical accuracy. The address 7 Eccles Street, the Blooms’ residence, was listed as vacant in 1904.

“In writing one must create an endlessly changing surface . . .”
–James Joyce, from Arthur Powers’s Conversations with James Joyce

Joyce created lists and charts to help plan Ulysses. This schema, as Joyce called it, diagrams the novel with respect to each episode’s symbol, color, art, organ, hour, scene, narrative technique, and Homeric correspondences. Joyce first collated notes in this scroll format to help certain writers discuss or translate parts of the work; he also made presentation copies for Harriet Shaw Weaver and Sylvia Beach around the time of the novel’s publication. The extensive Homeric links had been elaborated as he neared Ulysses’ completion, when Joyce sought to unify more motifs across episodes and clarify the structure. He later regretted the document’s unauthorized circulation, believing that it detracted from an appreciation of the novel’s overarching form and substance.

This is one of two versions of Joyce's diagram for "Oxen of the Sun"--an episode set in a maternity hospital. The near-illegible words track the month-by-month developments of a human fetus, paralleling the metamorphosis of language Joyce explores through pastiche. In a letter to Frank Budgen, dated 20 March 1920, Joyce wrote that he was hard at work on the episode—"the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition." Joyce related to Budgen a litany of the progression of literary styles he planned to employ, including a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude ("the unfertilized ovum"), early alliterative and monosyllabic English, Anglo-Saxon à la Mandeville, followed by Malory, the Elizabethan chronicle style, Milton, "Latin-gossipy," Burton, Browne, Bunyan, Pepys, Evelyn, Defoe, Swift, Addison and Steele, Sterne, Landor, and Pater, culminating in his identification of English, Irish, American, and Black vernaculars.

Joyce always carried note pads and stray bits of paper in his jacket. According to the painter Frank Budgen, a friend of Joyce’s, “alone or in conversation, seated or walking, one of these tablets was produced, and a word or two scribbled on it at lightning speed.” This aspect of Joyce’s composition process led Budgen and writer Valery Larbaud to compare Joyce to a Renaissance mosaic artist, patiently fabricating large figures of the saints out of tiny pieces of colored stones.

This page of “Sirens” is taken from the “fair copy” manuscript of Ulysses—a term used to describe manuscripts created for presentation, rendered in legible handwriting. Joyce prepared this particular manuscript in order to sell Ulysses in installments to the collector John Quinn.

Before his play Exiles was published or performed, Joyce had sold the manuscript to the American modern art collector and lawyer John Quinn (1870–1924), shown here standing with Joyce and the authors Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford. As scholars have noted, the sale marked a new source of income for Joyce, who struggled to support his family, and signaled his growing status as an author. Quinn’s investment in Joyce persisted far beyond Exiles: he acted as the attorney for Anderson and Heap in the obscenity case against Ulysses in the Little Review and promoted Joyce to American publishers. Among several other works, Quinn purchased a “fair copy” manuscript of Ulysses as it was being written, enabling Joyce to finish the novel.

Joyce made several typed versions of manuscripts before and after sending fair copies to John Quinn. This page from “Sirens” was sent to printers at the Little Review, an American literary magazine, in 1919 for the novel's initial serialization. Joyce’s handwritten revisions date from 1921, however, as he was beginning to assemble and revise his text for the first edition in Paris. 

Among several manuscripts and proofs on view related to "Cyclops" are two pages of what is likely the earliest surviving preliminary draft of the episode and a leaf from the 1919 typescript sent to the Little Review, revised two years later. "Cyclops," as Joyce originally wrote it, never appeared in the magazine in its entirety. Following the US Postal Service’s suppression of two Ulysses issues, the editors preemptively censored the first installment of “Cyclops.” One of Joyce’s passages, which alludes several times to erections, was replaced with an asterisk, an ellipsis, and a telling footnote.

Joyce reportedly wrote a third of Ulysses in proof—a stage in the publishing process that is typically reserved for minor corrections and additions. The large, eight-page format of French galley proofs on view in the gallery, known as placards, offered ample marginal space to accommodate Joyce’s creative practice. This detail of a "Cyclops" placard pertains to one of the passages that Joyce revised most heavily. In addition to the long marginal inscriptions, Joyce’s note in French, indicated with a red A, instructs the printer to insert two new manuscript pages, one of which is on view adjacent to the placard. The lengthy handwritten addition includes a list of “Friends of the Emerald Isle,” parodic names such as “Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone” and “Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant.” Across several stages of the proofs, the dignitaries expanded in number. In a brief note sent to Darantiere's manager, M. Hirchwald, Joyce conveyed another late addition named “Borus Hupinkoff” along with a postscript complaining about imperfections in their typographic character f. A pressman marked his request “trop tard” (too late) and Borus did not appear in editions of Ulysses for sixty years.

The first of twenty-three installments of Ulysses appeared in the Little Review in March 1918. Between 1919 and 1920, the US Postal Service confiscated four issues because they violated the Comstock Act, which prohibited the distribution by mail of printed matter deemed obscene. The issue containing an excerpt from the “Nausicaa” episode also provoked a court case against editors Anderson and Heap. In the offending passages, Leopold Bloom masturbates as he watches Gerty McDowell, a young woman who indulges him by leaning back and raising her skirt. Lawyer John Quinn’s defense—essentially, that Ulysses was not obscene since it was unintelligible to average readers—was a misfire. Anderson and Heap were fined, and the novel was banned in the United States.

Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) grew up in Baltimore, Paris, and Princeton, settling permanently in France in 1916. She opened Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop in Paris, in 1919. In February 1921 she began helping Joyce find typists for Ulysses and, by April, agreed to bring out the novel herself. Beach published the book eight times between 1924 and 1930, reportedly selling twenty-eight thousand copies. As a US citizen, Beach was briefly interned during the German occupation of France in 1941, the year Joyce died, and her shop never reopened. In her later years, Beach gave George Whitman her blessing to change his bookstore’s name to Shakespeare and Company, which remains in business today.

Sylvia Beach started her imprint Shakespeare and Company in 1921 in order to publish Ulysses (she would issue two other books and one audio recording, all by or about Joyce). In its early days, Shakespeare and Company was primarily a secondhand bookstore and lending library. Beach soon expanded her inventory to feature the latest modernist books and magazines, turning the small shop into a hub for savvy locals, expatriates, and tourists. Joyce met Beach shortly after moving to Paris in June 1920, and he joined the shop’s lending library later that year. The first book he borrowed was apparently The Master Builder by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906).

Soliciting subscriptions for Ulysses was imperative for Sylvia Beach to finance the hefty publication. This approach also designated the book a “private edition,” which diminished legal risks. Customers could order one of three versions, priced according to the fineness of their paper; the most expensive version was signed by Joyce. In 1921 and 1922 Beach printed hundreds of circulars such as this one and mailed them to individuals and bookshops around the world. Her forecast of a six-hundred-page book to be published in autumn 1921 proved optimistic. After the novel appeared on 2 February 1922, Beach annotated this circular accordingly: Ulysses was “now ready,” and the page count was 732.

Orders for Ulysses began to arrive in Sylvia Beach’s shop soon after she circulated her prospectus in spring 1921. Many early sales were to bookshops, including several in Paris, and to firms that exported books to Europe and America. These customers received what was a modest trade discount in 1922, and they could—and often did—inflate the price thereafter. J. Pierpont Morgan’s nephew Junius Spencer Morgan (1867–1932) ordered his personal copy directly from Beach.

In this letter to Sylvia Beach, a man named Hirchwald—the only English-speaking employee at Maurice Darantiere’s printshop—protests Joyce’s complaint about errors in the latest Ulysses proofs. Joyce was writing and proofing simultaneously, as he told a friend: “[I] am working like a lunatic, trying to revise and improve and connect and continue and create all at the one time.” Hirchwald blames Joyce’s handwritten additions for the errors, reminding Beach that his colleagues cannot read English. Promising to fix these “small nuisances” in his final proofreading, scholars have proven that Hirchwald in fact introduced new errors when correcting his typesetters’ work.

Tasked with the challenges of typesetting Joyce’s ever-changing text, the printer Maurice Darantiere also faced difficulties related to Ulysses’ cover. Joyce’s long-held superstitions that Greece brought him good luck led him to insist that the book be bound in the colors of the Greek flag—blue and white. Darantiere provided Joyce with sample after sample of blue paper, none of which satisfied the finicky author. Less than a month before publication day, Joyce sent the small Greek flag hanging in Shakespeare and Company to the artist Myron C. Nutting, asking him to identify the right pigment. Darantiere then lithographed the “Greek-flag blue” onto white paper.

On 7 August 1921, Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver to announce that he had composed the first sentence of Ulysses’ final episode, adding,“but as this contains about 2500 words the deed is more than it seems to be.” (In fact, the first sentence would be even longer, and the “Ithaca” episode was also far from complete.) Months later, he was still revising the text and checking facts, writing to his aunt, for instance, to make sure “an ordinary person” could climb over the railings at the Blooms’ Eccles Street address. Joyce continued to work on proofs through the end of January 1922.

Superstitious about his birthday, Joyce was determined that Ulysses be ready on 2 February. Few copies were bound on 1 February, but the printers granted Joyce’s wish, dispatching three copies by express mail and, at the author’s insistence, two more on the Dijon–Paris train, which were in his hands by early morning. In her memoir, Sylvia Beach recalled the momentous day: “Here at last was Ulysses. . . . Here were the seven hundred and thirty-two pages ‘complete as written,’ and an average of one to half a dozen typographical errors per page.”

Beach’s earliest surviving record of costs accrued for promoting, printing, and shipping Ulysses was compiled almost six months after the novel’s publication. Joyce’s relentless revisions and additions to the proofs reduced Beach’s initial profits; the printing costs were double what Maurice Darantiere had estimated in 1921. The unusual nature of Joyce’s professional relationship with Beach, who acted at times as his agent, secretary, and friend, is also evident in her bookkeeping, which includes fees for the seventeen-volume edition of Arabian Nights Joyce requested and for Dr. Borsch, the eye doctor Beach recommended to the author.

This is one of the two recordings of Joyce’s voice—a reading of John F. Taylor’s speech from the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses, recited by the author in a Cork accent. Sylvia Beach, who commissioned the disc, had planned to invite journalists to the session, but the producer at the record label His Master’s Voice was not interested in publicity. He foresaw no profit (voice recordings by authors were anomalies in 1924) and insisted the label’s name be kept out of it. Of the twenty or thirty pressings Beach authorized, all but a handful soon broke into pieces. To this day, it remains Joyce and Beach’s rarest “publication.”

In 1929, fifty kilometers from Paris in the Chevreuse Valley, Adrienne Monnier hosted a luncheon at the Hôtel Léopold to celebrate her publication of the French translation of Ulysses— an enormous undertaking, years in the making. Since Joyce’s arrival in Paris in 1920, Monnier elevated his reputation among prominent French writers. She hosted the first conference on Ulysses in 1921 at her bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres, which prompted the first substantial translations of excerpts from the novel. Joyce called her Déjeuner “Ulysse” a “country picnic,” though guests were chartered on a special bus and Monnier had the menu printed as a keepsake. The meal kicked off with paté de Léopold.

The writer Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949), who attended Monnier's Ulysses banquet and signed this copy of the keepsake menu, was credited in France in the late nineteenth century as the innovator of the stream-of-consciousness technique in narrative. Joyce had become familiar with Dujardin's work during his brief stint in Paris in 1902. More than twenty years later, when A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man was published in France, Dujardin became aware of certain similarities in their work—a connection that had also come to the attention of French critics regarding Joyce's version of stream of consciousness employed in Ulysses. Dujardin's career subsequently underwent a renaissance, which he credited to Joyce's fame in France. Joyce himself conceded his debt to Dujardin. In a copy of Ulysses inscribed to the French author, Joyce signed it "the impenitent thief."

Harriet Shaw Weaver was finally able to bring out her Egoist Ulysses in an edition of two thousand copies in October 1922. To evade legal troubles in England, she partnered with John Rodker to print it in France, from Sylvia Beach’s typeset plates. Bound in the same blue wrappers, its resemblance to the first edition initially unsettled Beach.

In December 1922 Weaver learned that US Customs had seized up to five hundred copies of her shipment to America, prompting her to commission five hundred replacements from the printer right away. Joyce took the opportunity to correct some of the hundreds of errors made by the French typesetters in the Beach’s first edition. The replacements never made it to America either, however, as British Customs destroyed the books in the harbor. This is one of approximately seven known copies of the five hundred replacements to survive.

When Joyce signed a contract with publisher Bennett Cerf’s Random House in 1932, Ulysses was still illegal in the United Sates. In partnership with ACLU lawyer Morris Ernst, Cerf set out to challenge the ban by importing a copy of Ulysses in plain sight, coaxing the government to put the book on trial. The package entered New York harbor unnoticed and made its way to Cerf’s office, prompting Ernst to return it to US Customs agents and, putting on an act, demand that the “suspicious” package be opened and subsequently seized. Within a few days, Cerf sent a circular letter to “editors, critics, authors, clergymen, members of the bar, sociologists, psychologists, teachers and libraries” to solicit opinions about the novel. Letters received in response became part of a strategic body of documentation, attesting to the book’s artistic value. In court Ernst argued for the novel’s literary merits. Judge John Munro Woolsey’s 1933 decision agreed that Ulysses was “a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind”—its allegedly obscene passages more likely to nauseate than sexually arouse. Woolsey’s friends printed his opinion in this pamphlet as the “latest . . . book review by Judge Woolsey.”

Moments after Judge Woolsey’s 6 December 1933 ruling, word was handed down to Random House’s typesetters to begin printing. Ulysses was published in America on 25 January 1934 in an edition of around ten thousand. The novel’s backstory and Bennett Cerf’s marketing strategies had all but guaranteed a smash hit. By 1939 over fifty thousand copies had been sold. Woolsey’s legal decision was printed at the front of the book, and Joyce contributed a letter about its publication history in place of an introduction.

Ernst Reichl, the lead designer at H. Wolff, which manufactured the Random House edition, combined his own elongated lettering on the dust jacket with eighteenth-century Baskerville inside and slightly altered versions of Ernst Rodolf Weiss's brand-new capitals. His innovative work achieved a modern aesthetic that simultaneously evoked the full-page ornate initials associated with medieval page design. Reichl had already won an AIGA award for a book with a double-page title spread, though the lettering had appeared only on the recto. For the double-spread title of Ulysses, however, a large U stands alone on the facing page, serving both as text and image. It became a landmark of modern graphic design.

Sylvia Beach and Harriet Shaw Weaver both collected clippings on Joyce’s behalf. After noticing the “Scandal” screamer in the Sporting Times, a London weekly, Weaver obtained copies of placards advertising the issue and sent at least two to Paris for Joyce and Beach. The Sporting Times write-up emphasized the book’s scabrous qualities, calling it a “stupid glorification of mere filth” and “literature of the latrine”; but the word “scandal” referred equally to the reviewer’s verdict of tediousness. Joyce chose one of the writer's sentences calling Ulysses “intensely dull” for Weaver's leaflet of press notices promoting the novel. Beach displayed another copy of this placard in her shop for years.

Virginia Woolf’s diary entry, which begins,“I should be reading ‘Ulysses’ and fabricating my case for and against,” conveys a mix of emotions and opinions about the novel’s first two hundred pages. Stimulated and amused by early episodes, Woolf is ultimately repulsed by its graphic passages. Shocked that “great Tom” (T. S. Eliot) rates it on a par with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Woolf calls Ulysses an “underbred” novel by an egoistic “self-taught working man.” Elsewhere in her diary and writings, Woolf sets aside some of her condescension and recognizes that Joyce was rehearsing aspects of narrative that she herself had begun to articulate and would realize in her own way: “to record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall,” “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.”

In early 1924 the Chicago Tribune heralded a new “electric opera” based on Ulysses by the modern composer George Antheil (1900–1959). The classically-trained New Jersey native was then living in Paris above Shakespeare and Company. Joyce and Nora became fond of the young avant-garde musician. They attended several of Antheil's riotous Paris concerts and remained friends for years. Despite his conservative taste in music, Joyce encouraged Antheil to complete the experimental work based on the "Cyclops" episode, giving him one of the coveted copies of the Ulysses Schema to aid in his endeavor.

Despite the advance publicity, Antheil never finished "Mr Bloom and the Cyclops." Instead, he became famous for the piece he was composing simultaneously: Ballet mécanique, with its player pianos, amplifiers, sirens, and standing fans simulating airplane propellers. As indicated on the fragment of the “Cyclops” score published in 1925, his Ulysses opera was arranged for electric motors, buzzers, amplified voices, gramophones, and sixteen player pianos. Subsequent collaborations between Joyce and Antheil also came to naught, though Antheil later published a musical setting of Joyce's poem "Nightpiece."

Borges refers to himself in a 1925 review of Ulysses on display as the first Hispanic adventurer to have reached the novel’s untamed country. The piece appears in an issue of Proa along with Borges's loose translation of the last passage of "Penelope." A letter from Borges to Guillermo de Torre and their shared copy of Ulysses, both in the Morgan's collection, document ways in which Joyce's work resonated for avant-garde writers in Argentina attempting to distinguish their work and their language from Spanish literature. Throughout his life, Borges would praise Joyce’s relation to time, merging of dream and waking, and creation of a total reality. But Borges also characterized Ulysses almost as a monstrosity, a text so expansive and elaborate that it was impossible to read or understand in its entirety. Borges’s own masterly short fiction often centers on themes suggestive of Joyce’s encyclopedic approach to creating Ulysses. Scholars have also noted that several of Borges’s characters are portrayed as Ulysses’ ideal readers—figures with infinite memories, such as Ireneo Funes, whom Borges mentioned in his 1941 obituary for Joyce.

The French painter Henri Matisse depicted figures related to the novel’s Homeric allusions for a deluxe edition of Ulysses in 1935. He was not adept at reading English and gave up on tackling the monumental novel in translation. As an alternative, a friend loaned him a book-length study of the novel by Stuart Gilbert. Writing under Joyce’s supervision, Gilbert had emphasized the work’s correspondences to classical literature. The artist was also given a copy of the Random House circular How to Enjoy James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, which made use of Joyce's Schema. When the edition’s publisher, George Macy, was unable to see connections between Matisse’s first two prints and the novel, the painter curtly relayed through his son that Random House had explicitly stated,“Nausicaa = Gerty MacDowel” [sic]. Joyce consented to Matisse’s approach over the telephone, the sole direct contact that transpired between artist and author.

Nabokov drew this diagram, which maps the itineraries of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in twelve episodes, for a course he taught called Masters of European Fiction. The Russian American novelist described these classes as “a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures.” He encouraged his pupils to approach artworks as entirely new worlds, study them closely in and of themselves, and “fondle the details.” In his notes for Ulysses, Nabokov draws attention to the novel’s synchronicities as exemplary of Joyce’s supreme artistic control—pointing out the near misses and intersections of Bloom and Stephen (“a kind of slow dance of fate”) and of language, gesture, and thought—“Everything is in correspondence.”

A letter on view from Ralph Ellison to the critic Kenneth Burke was written in 1945 soon after Ellison published “Richard Wright’s Blues,” an essay that includes a comparison of Wright’s rejection of his cultural origins as a Black man in the US South to Joyce’s rejection of Ireland. Ellison expanded his ideas in a public lecture that year at Bennington College and, when later speaking to a class, had an epiphany, as he tells Burke: “I went to Joyce for illumination of Negro life only to discover that it works both ways and that Negro life illuminates much of Joyce. From that single experience at Bennington I believe I have the key to a whole new system of Negro education. I know too much, however, about how this country is run to believe anyone would take an interest in doing anything about it.”

When the American painter Robert Motherwell created a foundation in 1981, he named it after Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus. Motherwell was twenty in 1935 when he discovered a copy of Ulysses in a Paris bookstall. The artist was searching for a key to his own modernist aesthetic, he later said, and found one in Joyce. Throughout his life, he would return to the author’s books whenever he became discouraged: “A writer like Joyce can make me just want to paint. The magic of painting is there. It gives me almost a chill what words can do.” Motherwell’s first artworks referencing the author date from the late 1940s, though it was not until publisher Andrew Hoyem commissioned this edition in the 1980s that the artist took on the entire novel. Freely responding to Joyce’s writing, Motherwell produced line etchings evocative of calligraphic scrawls.

Finch’s book, which relates to his art installation Ulysses (September 19, 2014), records the artist’s wanderings through New York on one day. Charted as a progression of the colors he encountered, the book evokes personalized travel maps from the twentieth century, called TripTiks, and Pantone’s commercial color-matching swatches. Finch documents the source of each hue in brief captions, such as “fire hydrant,” “moss on gravestone,” and “subway.” At one point, the chromatic litany of New York shifts from the everyday to the transcendent when Finch looks at a book and artworks by Josef Albers (1888–1976).

Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian-born artist in Paris, created several portraits of Joyce. They were commissioned by the American expatriates Harry and Caresse Crosby for their limited edition of excerpts from Finnegans Wake. Rather than use a likeness for the frontispiece, Caresse Crosby chose a spiral design by Brancusi, who called it “Symbol of James Joyce.” It was identified in the Crosbys' book, however, as “Portrait of the Author.” Reportedly, when Joyce’s father saw Brancusi’s image, he remarked,“Jim has changed more than I thought.” Brancusi later explained the cryptic image to the painter Jacques Hérold, noting,“Joyce is like that: he departs from one point, and you’ll never meet him again.”

Joyce devoted seventeen years to writing Finnegans Wake—a novel about a single night, composed in a style he described as “gliding and unreal as is the way in dreams.” Despite the presence of characters and plot, the Wake defies all other conventions of narrative. It is an assemblage of puns, riddles, and myths—derived from more than sixty languages—that begins and ends in the middle of the same sentence. By 1936 Joyce said that the book had become “more real to [him] than reality, and everything has led to it.” The work’s serialization and stand-alone publications of excerpts often elicited perplexed or negative responses from critics. Joyce considered it his greatest work. The copy shown here is an advance copy of the novel, bound in printed paper-covered boards bearing the final dust jacket design–one of the few known to survive.

The first publication in a book by Samuel Beckett, future playwright of Waiting for Godot, was an essay in this anthology that Joyce supervised and designed. The collection, which also includes texts by William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon, sought to interpret and defend Joyce’s work in progress Finnegans Wake. Beckett had met Joyce soon after moving from Dublin to Paris to teach at the École normale. Joyce welcomed him into the family and sometimes used him as a research assistant and secretary. Beckett later recalled that, when he was taking dictation for Finnegans Wake, he once mistakenly recorded Joyce’s response to a noise outside. When Beckett read the passage back to the author, Joyce noted the gaffe and said,“Let it stand.”

Joyce’s recording of the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” episode from Finnegans Wake was commissioned by the linguistic psychologist C. K. Ogden, who was translating the text into his invented language, called Basic English. The record drew attention in the press; it aired on the BBC and was sold at a prestigious London music store. T. S. Eliot used it as a cross-promotion for the publication of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” in his Criterion Miscellany pamphlet series. Due to the decline in Joyce’s eyesight, photographic enlargements of a printed edition were kept on hand in the recording studio. The letters were not big enough, however, and Ogden reportedly stood by Joyce, whispering into his ear the author’s own words.

When Joyce pressed Ezra Pound for his opinion of the verse Joyce had written since Chamber Music, Pound was dismissive: “They belong in the bible or in the family album with the portraits.” This luxurious publication, featuring ornate lettering by Lucia Joyce, to some extent follows Pound’s directive, as a father-daughter collaboration formatted like a scrapbook. Twenty-five copies were printed. The edition, which Joyce referred to simply as “Lucia’s book,” came about through his many attempts to interest publishers in Lucia’s work. Obelisk, the Paris publisher of Pomes, eventually brought out her illuminated Chaucer A.B.C. in 1936.

Limited editions of fragments from Finnegans Wake reflect Joyce’s increased attention to his books’ design. Often, before he had secured a contract, he had fully conceived the publication as an object: detailed instructions for the binding color, typography, and page design accompanied his manuscripts. Anticipating public resistance to the texts, he also requested room for contextual front matter. Delays to this fine-press edition of the “Storiella” fragment were caused by Joyce’s complex layout. In addition to his daughter's elaborate initial A, it includes medievalist rubrics, footnotes, diagrams, and marginal texts.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus breaks his glasses on the school’s cinder path. For this he is unfairly reprimanded, leaving him “burning with shame” in front of his classmates. Stephen’s fuzzy perception of the schoolyard without corrective lenses—“the fellows seemed to him smaller and farther away . . . and the soft grey sky so high up”—evokes Joyce’s lifelong issues with his eyesight. From 1907 Joyce experienced bouts of iritis and would eventually develop glaucoma, cataracts, and nebulae. He underwent a series of painful surgeries and by the end of his life was blind in one eye with greatly reduced vision in the other.

Joyce wrote this note to George Pelorson (the pseudonym for Georges Belmont [1909-2008]) on his calling card in Ulysses-blue ink. It was enclosed with a copy of the 1939 Official Dublin Guide. The book had just been sent anonymously to Joyce’s address and he assumed a friend of his schoolmate Constantine Curran was responsible. Pelorson, a good friend of Beckett’s, was a frequent companion of Joyce toward the end of the 1930s. When he received the note and enclosure, Pelorson was working on an article on Finnegans Wake for Revue de Paris. Explaining that the Dublin guide is à propos of nothing, Joyce asks him to look at two “curious” pages where, unsurprisingly, the author is mentioned. Among other references, the guide highlights number 41, Brighton Square, Rathgar, as the birthplace of the world-famous writer.