James Joyce Trivia
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60 free James Joyce trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
51 free James Joyce trivia questions with answers. James Joyce wrote one of the most celebrated novels of the twentieth century and one of the least read, and this quiz covers both. Fifty-one questions run from his birth in Rathgar and the Jesuit schools of Clongowes and Belvedere through the first walk with Nora, the years teaching English in Trieste, wartime Zurich and the Paris of Sylvia Beach and Ezra Pound, to his death in 1941 and the grave that Ireland declined to bring home. The books get their due: the fifteen stories of Dubliners and 'The Dead', the fire that nearly ate the Portrait manuscript, Bloom's kidney and Molly's unpunctuated monologue, the American judge who ruled Ulysses was 'emetic' but not obscene, the seventeen years spent on Finnegans Wake, and the physicist who lifted 'quark' from it. Easy questions ask when Bloomsday falls; hard ones want the name of the printer in Dijon and the price of Pomes Penyeach. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Joyce, his works and his circle, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01In which Dublin suburb was James Joyce born in 1882?
Rathgar
Rathgar, then a prosperous south Dublin suburb, is where Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children of John and May Joyce.
Q 02On what date is Bloomsday celebrated each year?
16 June
It is the day on which the whole of Ulysses takes place, and fans in Edwardian dress retrace Bloom's route around Dublin.
Q 03In which year was Ulysses first published as a complete book?
1922
The book follows three Dubliners through a single day in 1904, and its fans now celebrate that date every year.
Q 04Ulysses parallels the episodes of which ancient epic poem?
The Odyssey
The Odyssey supplies the scaffold: the novel's canvasser hero stands in for the wandering Odysseus, Stephen Dedalus for his son Telemachus, and Molly for the waiting Penelope.
Q 05What was the name of Joyce's lifelong partner, later his wife?
Nora Barnacle
She was a chambermaid from Galway working at Finn's Hotel when they met in June 1904, and the relationship lasted 37 years.
Q 06Who is the advertisement canvasser at the centre of Ulysses?
Leopold Bloom
Leopold Bloom is the son of Rudolf Virág, a Hungarian Jew who anglicised the surname; virág means 'flower' in Hungarian, hence Bloom.
Q 07How many short stories make up Dubliners?
Fifteen
Fifteen stories, written between 1904 and 1907 and published in 1914 after years of disputes with printers, move from childhood through adolescence to maturity and public life.
Q 08In which city was Ulysses first published as a complete book?
Paris
Paris was the place: no English or American printer would touch it, so a small Left Bank bookshop became the book's publisher for the occasion.
Q 09Which bookshop owner published Ulysses in 1922?
Sylvia Beach
Sylvia Beach, the American owner of Shakespeare and Company, which had opened only in 1919, offered to publish the book after watching Joyce fail to find anyone else.
Q 10What is the title of Joyce's only surviving play, first staged in 1919?
Exiles
Exiles, Joyce's only surviving play, was published in 1918 and first staged in Munich in August 1919; its theme of a husband testing his wife's fidelity drew on Joyce's own jealousy.
Q 11How many years did Joyce spend composing Finnegans Wake?
17
17 years: Joyce began the book in 1923, the year after Ulysses, and it was published on 4 May 1939, less than two years before his death.
Q 12Which physicist borrowed the word 'quark' from Finnegans Wake?
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann lifted 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!' from Finnegans Wake in 1963; the line suited him because his quarks came in threes, and he chose to pronounce it 'kwork'.
Q 13In which city did Joyce die in January 1941?
Zurich
He had fled occupied France only weeks earlier and died two days after surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer, aged 58.
Q 21In which Dublin suburb did Joyce and Nora take their first walk together on 16 June 1904?
Ringsend
Ringsend, by the docks on the south side of the Liffey, was where they first walked out together; they had met only six days earlier, on 10 June 1904, when she was working as a chambermaid.
Q 22In which town or city was Joyce's wife Nora born?
Galway
Galway: Nora was born there in 1884 and grew up in a small house on Bowling Green, which later opened as a museum dedicated to her.
Q 23In what year did Joyce and Nora finally marry, in a London register office?
1931
1931: they married at Kensington register office on 4 July, after 27 years together, chiefly to secure the children's inheritance under English law.
Q 14What is the name of the young playwright Joyce hired as an assistant, who later wrote Waiting for Godot?
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett, then a young lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure, helped Joyce with research for his last book; the friendship cooled for a time after Beckett rebuffed the affections of Joyce's daughter Lucia.
Q 15Which American poet became Joyce's champion, getting A Portrait of the Artist serialised in The Egoist?
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound first wrote to Joyce in December 1913 on Yeats's advice, asking to reprint a Chamber Music poem in Des Imagistes, and then placed A Portrait in The Egoist in 1914.
Q 16In which Austro-Hungarian port city did Joyce live for most of the years 1905 to 1915?
Trieste
He called it a second Dublin, taught English at the Berlitz school there, and worked out Leopold and Molly Bloom in the city.
Q 17What is the title of the last and longest story in Dubliners?
The Dead
The Dead, at nearly 16,000 words, is sometimes called a novella; it ends with Gabriel Conroy watching the snow fall on the living and the dead, and John Huston filmed it in 1987 as his final movie.
Q 18Which Jesuit boarding school did the six-year-old Joyce enter in 1888?
Clongowes Wood College
Clongowes Wood College, in County Kildare, took him in 1888 at six and a half; he left in 1891 when the family could no longer pay the fees, and the school opens A Portrait of the Artist.
Q 19Which American judge ruled in December 1933 that Ulysses was not obscene?
John M. Woolsey
John M. Woolsey, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, ruled on 6 December 1933; his opinion conceded the book was in places 'somewhat emetic' but nowhere an aphrodisiac.
Q 20Which US publisher deliberately had a copy of Ulysses seized by Customs to set up the 1933 test case?
Random House
Random House, under Bennett Cerf, imported a copy in 1932 so that lawyer Morris Ernst could force a test case; Customs waved the parcel through and had to be asked to seize it.
Q 24How many episodes make up Ulysses?
Eighteen
Eighteen episodes, split into three parts of 3, 12 and 3; the Homeric titles such as 'Hades' and 'Ithaca' come from Joyce's schemata and never appear in the text itself.
Q 25How many numbered copies made up the first edition of Ulysses?
1,000
1,000 numbered copies: 100 signed on Dutch handmade paper at 350 francs, 150 on vergé d'Arches at 250 and 750 on ordinary paper at 150; the text was riddled with printer's errors.
Q 26In which French city was the first edition of Ulysses printed?
Dijon
Dijon was where Maurice Darantiere's press set and printed the book; Darantiere later reused the plates for the Egoist Press edition sold in England later that year.
Q 27Which magazine serialised Ulysses in the US from 1918 to 1920, leading to an obscenity conviction?
The Little Review
The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, ran Ulysses in instalments until the 'Nausicaa' episode brought a 1921 obscenity conviction; the Post Office had already burned several issues.
Q 28From which Dorset Street pork butcher does Bloom buy his breakfast kidney in 'Calypso'?
Dlugacz
Dlugacz, the pork butcher, sells Bloom a pork kidney for breakfast, an irony Joyce planted for his Jewish hero; the episode opens by noting he ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
Q 29At what Dublin address do Leopold and Molly Bloom live?
7 Eccles Street
7 Eccles Street, a real north-side address that stood empty in 1904; the house was demolished in 1967 and its front door was rescued for display at the James Joyce Centre.
Q 30Where was Molly Bloom born?
Gibraltar
Gibraltar: Molly was born there in 1870 to Major Brian Tweedy and Lunita Laredo, and her closing monologue returns to its memories; a bronze of her stands in the Alameda Gardens.