50 Fun Facts About Ulysses

James Joyce's Ulysses follows three Dubliners over the course of a single day in which year?

That date, 16 June, is now celebrated every year as Bloomsday.

Ulysses was published in full on 2 February 1922, a date chosen because it was what?

Sylvia Beach received the first three copies from the printer that morning.

The title Ulysses is the Latinised name of which hero of Homer's Odyssey?

Joyce first met the character in Charles Lamb's children's version and wrote a school essay calling him 'My Favourite Hero'.

Which character in Ulysses corresponds to Telemachus, the hero's son in Homer?

He is the protagonist of Joyce's earlier A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Bloom stands in for Odysseus and Molly for Penelope.

What is Leopold Bloom's job?

He spends part of the day failing to place an ad at the Freeman's Journal.

Ulysses is divided into how many episodes?

They are grouped in three parts of 3, 12 and 3, echoing the Odyssey's division; the Homeric titles do not appear in the text.

The novel opens on the roof of a Martello tower in which Dublin suburb?

The action ends across the bay on Howth Head; the real tower is now the James Joyce Tower and Museum.

Ulysses' famous first sentence introduces which character coming from the stairhead with a bowl of lather?

The 'stately, plump' medical student was modelled on a real Dublin friend Joyce later fell out with.

Buck Mulligan in Ulysses was partly based on which real Dublin figure, with whom Joyce had fallen out?

He was a medical student who had saved men from drowning and paid the tower's rent himself, unlike Mulligan.

Joyce himself stayed in the Martello tower of the opening episode in September of the novel's year for how long?

Gogarty blamed the abrupt departure on a midnight incident with a loaded revolver.

Stephen's surname in the novel alludes to the mythical craftsman who built what?

In the early draft Stephen Hero it was spelled 'Daedalus'; Mulligan mocks it as 'an ancient Greek' name.

In 'Nestor', headmaster Garrett Deasy asks Stephen to deliver a newspaper letter about which subject?

The same episode gives us Stephen's line that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake.

In Ulysses' 'Calypso' episode, what does Leopold Bloom go out to buy for breakfast?

He brings Molly her breakfast in bed along with the mail, including a letter from her concert manager Blazes Boylan.

The Blooms' home, setting of the 'Calypso', 'Ithaca' and 'Penelope' episodes, is at what address?

Bella Cohen's brothel is on Tyrone Street; the Sweny's chemist where Bloom buys soap still stands on Lincoln Place.

Under what pseudonym does Leopold Bloom collect a love letter from 'Martha Clifford' at the post office?

He tears up the envelope in an alley and later composes a reply in the Ormond Hotel.

Bloom buys a bar of what scented soap at Sweny's Pharmacy in the 'Lotus Eaters' episode?

Sweny's still sells the soap to Bloomsday pilgrims today.

Bantam Lyons mistakenly thinks Bloom is tipping him a horse with what name?

The name is what Bloom actually says as he hands over his newspaper, and the outsider goes on to win the Gold Cup.

Whose funeral does Bloom attend in the 'Hades' episode?

During the burial he notices a mysterious man in a mackintosh whose identity is never explained.

In Davy Byrne's pub, Bloom lunches on a glass of burgundy and a sandwich made with which cheese?

He had fled the Burton restaurant, revolted by men eating like animals; the pub is a Bloomsday landmark.

In the National Library, Stephen expounds a biographical theory about which Shakespeare play?

He argues it grew from the posited adultery of Shakespeare's wife; the theory draws on twelve lectures Joyce gave in 1912.

The 'Wandering Rocks' episode consists of how many short vignettes moving through the streets of Dublin?

It opens with Father Conmee heading north and closes with the Lord Lieutenant's cavalcade.

The 'Cyclops' episode's antisemitic Fenian, 'the Citizen', is thought to satirise a founder of which organisation?

Michael Cusack is the model; the Citizen hurls a biscuit tin at Bloom's head and misses.

Which Gerty MacDowell episode on Sandymount Strand triggered the 1920 US obscenity case?

John S. Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice brought the case; the Post Office burned copies of the book through the 1920s.

The 'Oxen of the Sun' episode, set in a maternity hospital, parodies the history of what?

It moves from Latinate prose and Anglo-Saxon alliteration through Malory, Bunyan, Dickens and others to modern slang, matching nine months of gestation.

The 'Circe' episode, set in Bella Cohen's brothel in Nighttown, is written in what form?

Bloom hallucinates being crowned king of 'Bloomusalem' and being turned into a woman by 'Mr Bello'.

The 'Ithaca' episode, reportedly Joyce's favourite, is a catechism of how many questions and answers?

Its mock-scientific narrator makes many errors, most of them apparently deliberate.

Molly Bloom's closing soliloquy in 'Penelope' runs to how many paragraphs, famously without punctuation?

She recalls her childhood on the Rock, her lover Boylan and Bloom's proposal, ending on the word 'Yes'.

Where was Molly Bloom born?

Born Marion Tweedy, daughter of an Irish major and a Gibraltarian of Spanish descent, she is honoured with a bronze statue in Gibraltar's Alameda Gardens.

Leopold Bloom's father, Rudolf Virág, emigrated to Dublin from which country?

The town of Szombathely, his fictional birthplace, has held Bloomsday celebrations since 1994.

Bloom's infant son Rudy, whose death haunts him, lived for how long?

Daughter Milly, born 1889, is working in a photography business in Mullingar on the day of the novel.

Italo Svevo, a model for Bloom, was the pen name of a businessman Joyce taught English in which city?

Ettore Schmitz was among Joyce's favourite Berlitz pupils and turned out to be an unrecognised novelist himself.

Joyce chose 16 June for the novel as the date of the novel because it marked his first outing with whom?

She became his wife; the earliest mention of people observing 'Bloom's day' is in a Joyce letter of 1924.

The first Bloomsday pilgrimage in 1954 was led by publican John Ryan and which novelist?

Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin joined them; Ryan filmed the day and the party famously did not get very far.

Sylvia Beach published Ulysses from her Paris bookshop, which was called what?

She had opened it in 1919 with help from Adrienne Monnier and later hid Jewish friends from the Gestapo.

Sylvia Beach, the American who published Ulysses, was born in which US city?

Born Nancy Woodbridge Beach in her father's parsonage, she is buried in Princeton, New Jersey.

The 1922 first edition of Ulysses ran to how many numbered copies?

A hundred were signed on Dutch handmade paper at 350 francs; the first edition contained over 2,000 errors.

Which publisher engineered a US Customs seizure of Ulysses in 1932 to force a test case?

Lawyer Morris Ernst had to carry the unopened package to Customs himself and demand it be seized after officials let it through.

Which judge ruled in 1933 that Ulysses was not obscene, calling it 'somewhat emetic' but nowhere 'aphrodisiac'?

His opinion is printed in every US edition from the publisher that fought the case and is said to be the most widely distributed judicial opinion in history.

Ulysses was banned in the United Kingdom until which year?

The Bodley Head edition of that year was the first printed and published in England; the Irish censors never formally banned it but a customs loophole kept it out until the 1960s.

Which scholar's attack on Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 'corrected' Ulysses sparked the Joyce Wars?

His 1988 essay 'The Scandal of Ulysses' showed Gabler had renamed real Dubliners Harry Thrift and Captain Buller as 'Shrift' and 'Culler'.

RTÉ's unabridged dramatised radio Ulysses on Bloomsday 1982 ran uninterrupted for roughly how long?

The same year Anthony Burgess composed the operetta Blooms of Dublin.

Joseph Strick's 1967 film of Ulysses was banned in which country until 2000?

It was condemned as 'subversive to public morality'; the ban was lifted at Strick's own request.

Which future Lolita author called Ulysses 'a divine work of art' and the century's greatest prose masterpiece?

When he pointed out Joyce's use of Homer, Joyce dismissed it as 'a whim'.

Tennyson wrote 'Ulysses' in 1833 after the death of which friend?

Tennyson was 24; the 70-line dramatic monologue was not published until 1842 and never revised.

Most critics see Tennyson's Ulysses as drawing chiefly on the Ulisse of which earlier work?

There he is damned among the false counsellors for the Trojan Horse and for lusting after knowledge beyond human bounds.

The ESA-NASA Ulysses probe, launched in 1990, studied which body from above its poles?

It swung past Jupiter to climb out of the plane of the planets and was originally to carry the Greek form of the name.

The 18th US president, born Hiram Ulysses Grant, was named 'Hiram' to honour whom?

His father Jesse always called him Ulysses anyway; the 'S.' came later from a clerical error.

Which author's children's adaptation of the Odyssey first introduced Joyce to the Latinised hero?

At school Joyce wrote an essay on the character called 'My Favourite Hero', and later called Ulysses the only all-round character in literature.

Which novelist described Ulysses in 1923 as 'a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster'?

The same year T. S. Eliot called it 'the most important expression which the present age has found'.

Which secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice instigated the 1920 US prosecution?

Three earlier chapters had already been banned by the Post Office before the 'Nausicaa' issue of The Little Review triggered the case.