ULYSSES

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

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 her 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.

James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin in 1882. At twenty years old, Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. His writings include Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, Pomes Penyeach, and Finnegans Wake. Ulysses required seven years to complete and Finnegans Wake took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.