The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for Joyce's Ulysses

Published in 1922, James Joyce's Ulysses relates in pointillist detail a single day—June 16, 1904—in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom, cast loosely as the eponymous Homeric hero. But the saga of the novel and its road to publication and sale goes far deeper than just the story between the covers, observes Birmingham (history & literature, Harvard Univ.). One of the most lauded, controversial, and frequently banned books ever published, Joyce's masterpiece was a touchstone for the icons of modern literary and intellectual endeavor—Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway, among them—and nearly a century later stands at the pinnacle of novels published in English. Covering three decades, from the book's conception in 1905 through Joyce's infatuation with Nora Barnacle (who would later become the novel's Molly Bloom) to the push-and-pull of wildly disparate critical opinion and the groundbreaking 1933 obscenity trial decision ruling in favor of publication in the United States, Birmingham brings to life a work after which "modernist experimentation was no longer marginal. It was essential."