Author of Ulysses, revolutionary of the modernist novel
An Irish writer, a central figure of the twentieth-century revolution in the novel. His Ulysses uses a whole book to write only what one ordinary man of Dublin sees and thinks in a single day, yet hides within it the structure of Homer’s Odyssey. He pushed "stream of consciousness" to its limit — letting words follow the leaping, broken, unsorted flow of a mind — and changed forever what a novel can write and how. The book is difficult and dense, yet is acknowledged as one of the summits of modern literature.
Ulysses is set on 16 June 1904, one ordinary day of a Dublin advertising canvasser. Joyce turned this plain day into more than seven hundred pages — because what he wanted to catch was the ceaseless flow of thought in the mind at every instant. Today fans still keep "Bloomsday" each 16 June, honoring this ordinary, immortal day.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.