Ulysses Complete & Unabridged As Corrected & Reset in 1961

Ulysses is one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. It was not easy to find a publisher in America willing to take it on, and when Jane Jeap and Margaret Anderson started printing extracts from the book in their literary magazine The Little Review in 1918, they were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity. They were fined $100, and even The New York Times expressed satisfaction with their conviction. Ulysses was not published in book form until 1922, when another American woman, Sylvia Beach, published it in Paris through her legendary Shakespeare & Company. Ulysses was not available legally in any English-speaking country until 1934, when Random House successfully defended Joyce against obscenity charges and published it in the Modern Library. This edition follows the complete and unabridged text as corrected and reset in 1961. Judge John Woolsey's decision lifting the ban against Ulysses is reprinted, along with a letter from Joyce to Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House, and the original foreword to the book by Morris L. Ernst, who defended Ulysses during the trial.

"Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua immortalized Rabelais, and The Brothers Karamazov immortalized Dostoyevsky....It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence." The New York Times

"To my mind one of the most significant and beautiful books of our time." Gilbert Seldes, in The Nation

"Talk about understanding 'feminine psychology' — I have never read anything to surpass it, and I doubt if I have ever read anything to equal it." Arnold Bennett

"Yet, for all its appalling longueurs, Ulysses is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge — unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction — or in inventing new literary forms — Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old — as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy." Edmund Wilson Jr., The New Republic, 1922 (read the entire New Republic review)

"It is a striking fact about English literature in the twentieth century that its most notable practitioners have seldom been Englishmen....That English was not Joyce's native language, in the strictest sense, he was keenly aware; and it helps to explain his unparalleled virtuosity. But a more concrete explanation is to be discerned among his physical traits, one of which we normally classify as a serious handicap. Joyce lived much of his life in varying states of semi-blindness....His writing tends more and more toward low visibility; his imagination is auditory rather than visual....It is scarcely coincidental that Joyce, almost unique among modern prose writers in this respect, must be read aloud to be fully appreciated." Harry Levin, The Atlantic Monthly, 1946 (read the entire Atlantic Monthly review)

This revised volume of the acclaimed novel follows the complete unabridged text as corrected in 1961.

Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century.

This edition contains the original foreword by the author and the historic court ruling to remove the federal ban. It also contains page references to the first American edition of 1934.

This revised volume follows the complete unabridged text as corrected in 1961. Contains the original foreword by the author and the historic court ruling to remove the federal ban. It also contains page references to the first American edition of 1934.

James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, Dublin. He was one of ten children. He was educated at Jesuit schools and at University College, Dublin. A brilliant student of languages, Joyce once wrote an admiring letter in Norwegian to Henrik Ibsen. He went to Paris for a year in 1902, where he discovered the novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupes by Edouard Dujardin, whose stream-of-consciousness technique he later credited with influencing his own work. Following his mother's death, he returned to Ireland for a brief stay, and then left with Nora Barnacle, with whom he spent the rest of his life. They had two children, George and Lucia Anna, the latter of whom suffered in later years from schizophrenia. (Joyce and Nora were formally married in 1931.)

Joyce lived in voluntary exile from Ireland, although Irish life continued to provide the raw material for his writing. In Trieste, he taught English and made the acquaintance of the Italian novelist Italo Svevo. His first book, the poetry collection Chamber Music, appeared in 1907. The publication of the short story collection Dubliners was delayed repeatedly, and eventually the Irish publisher destroyed the proofs for fear of libel action; this prompted Joyce's final visit to Ireland in 1912. The book was eventually published in 1914 and greeted with acclaim by Ezra Pound, whose enthusiastic support helped Joyce establish a literary career. In 1915 Joyce and Nora moved to Zurich, and at the end of World War I they settled in Paris. His only play, Exiles, was published in 1918 and staged in Munich the same year without success. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an autobiographical novel (developed from the embryonic, posthumously published Stephen Hero) tracing the artistic development of Stephen Dedalus, was published in 1916. By this time Pound and W. B. Yeats had succeeded in obtaining for Joyce some financial support through the Royal Literary Fund, but he continued to be in need of money for most of his life.

Joyce began to suffer from serious vision difficulties due to glaucoma; he would eventually be forced to undergo many operations and long periods of near-blindness. Ulysses, the epic reconstruction of the minutiae of a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — was serialized in The Little Review starting in 1918, and published in Paris (by the American Sylvia Beach through her bookstore Shakespeare & Company) in 1922, on his fortieth birthday. Due to censorship it remained unavailable in the United States until 1934 and in the United Kingdom until 1936. Except for a small volume of verse, Pomes Penyeach (1927), Joyce published nothing thereafter except extracts from the enormous work in progress that emerged as Finnegans Wake in 1939. In his later years he was closely associated with the young Samuel Beckett, whom he had met in 1928. After the German invasion of France, Joyce and Nora moved back to Zurich, where he died on January 13, 1941.