Joyce left Dublin young and spent his life in self-imposed exile on the Continent — poor, his eyesight failing — yet wrote about almost nothing but the city he had abandoned. Breaking with the Church and Irish nationalism alike, he pushed fiction further inward than anyone before: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, and above all Ulysses, which renders the unfiltered stream of a single mind across one ordinary Dublin day. Banned for obscenity in Britain and America for over a decade, Ulysses redefined what a novel could do. His final book, Finnegans Wake, dissolved language itself into multilingual dream-puns.
On a single ordinary day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, an advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom buys a kidney, goes to a funeral, eats lunch, and wanders home. Nothing much happens. Out of that nothing James Joyce built Ulysses, often called the greatest novel of the twentieth century, by doing something no one had done so completely before: he put the whole unstopping flow of a human mind on the page, every stray thought, memory, appetite, and association, as it actually runs. Joyce had left Ireland as a young man for a self-imposed exile that took him to Trieste, Zurich, and Paris — poor and plagued by failing eyesight — yet he wrote about almost nothing but Dublin. The book was banned for obscenity in Britain and America for over a decade before courts cleared it. By then he had already changed what a novel could try to do.