This account of several lower class citizens of Dublin describes their activities and tells what some of them were thinking one day in 1904.

William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism. Considered the greatest 20th century novel written in English, in this edition Walter Gabler uncovers previously unseen text.

An account of the dramatic writing of and fight to publish James Joyce's "Ulysses" reveals how the now classic book was the subject of a landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933 that overturned key censorship laws.