James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (b. 2 February 1882 – d. 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and short story writer celebrated for his experimental use of language and literary form in canonical works of fiction, such as Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Finnegan’s Wake (1939). Joyce was famed for his stream of consciousness style, becoming a literary celebrity of his time and a key figure of the modernist movement.
Ulysses (1922) is Joyce’s most famous work. Loosely based on Homer’s The Odyssey, the novel follows the activities and experiences of three characters—Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus—on a single day in Dublin: 16 June 1904. It is a difficult work of fiction, offering dramatic stylistic changes in each of its eighteen chapters. Originally published in serial format in the modernist magazine, The Little Review, Ulysses gained notoriety when obscenity charges were brought against it in 1920 by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Editors of The Little Review, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were fined $100 and forced to cease publishing the novel in instalments following the trial. Ulysses was eventually published in its entirety by Shakespeare and Company (Paris: 1922) at the discretion of the bookseller Sylvia Beach.
This landmark work of literary modernism owes a considerable debt to the silent behind-the-scenes labour of Anderson, Heap, and Beach: three gay American women. What is the significance, we might ask, of the fact that a work considered obscene and daring in its representation of the human body and sexuality was published by women whose sexuality was still considered a criminal offence in 1920s New York?