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
He was born at 41 Brighton Square, the eldest of ten surviving siblings, and the family moved often as his father's finances collapsed.
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
Bloom stands in for the wandering Greek hero, 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
He is the son of a Hungarian Jew named Virág, which means 'flower' and explains the surname the family adopted.
Q 07How many short stories make up Dubliners?
Fifteen
Written between 1904 and 1907, the stories move from childhood to age and end with the long story 'The Dead'.
Q 08In which city was Ulysses first published as a complete book?
Paris
No English or American printer would touch it, so a small Left Bank bookshop became a publisher for the occasion.
Q 09Which bookshop owner published Ulysses in 1922?
Sylvia Beach
Her shop, Shakespeare and Company, had only opened in 1919; she offered to publish the book after watching Joyce fail to find anyone else.
Q 10Ulysses was published on Joyce's birthday. Which birthday was it?
40th
Joyce insisted on the date and the first three copies arrived from the printer that morning, 2 February 1922.
Q 11How many years did Joyce spend composing Finnegans Wake?
17
Its title was kept secret until publication day in May 1939; before that the world knew it only as 'Work in Progress'.
Q 12Which physicist borrowed the word 'quark' from Finnegans Wake?
Murray Gell-Mann
The line he lifted was 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!', which suited him because quarks were then thought to come in threes.
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
They had met only six days earlier, on 10 June, when she was working as a chambermaid in the city.
Q 22In which town or city was Joyce's wife Nora born?
Galway
Her childhood home on Bowling Green is now a small museum dedicated to her life.
Q 23In what year did Joyce and Nora finally marry, in a London register office?
1931
They had lived together for 27 years by then; the ceremony was partly to secure their children's inheritance under English law.
How many episodes make up Ulysses?
Q 14What is the name of the young playwright Joyce hired as an assistant, who later wrote Waiting for Godot?
Samuel Beckett
He collected foreign words on cards for Joyce's last book, and the friendship cooled after he rebuffed Joyce's daughter.
Q 15Which American poet became Joyce's champion, getting A Portrait of the Artist serialised in The Egoist?
Ezra Pound
He first wrote to Joyce on Yeats's advice, asking to reprint a Chamber Music poem in an Imagist anthology.
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
At nearly 16,000 words it is sometimes called a novella, 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
He had to leave in 1891 when his father could no longer pay the fees; the school reappears in the opening of A Portrait.
Q 19Which American judge ruled in December 1933 that Ulysses was not obscene?
John M. Woolsey
His opinion famously conceded that 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
Customs waved the parcel through, so lawyer Morris Ernst had to carry it back and demand it be seized.
Eighteen
They are split into three parts of 3, 12 and 3, and the Homeric titles like 'Circe' and 'Ithaca' never appear in the text itself.
Q 25How many numbered copies made up the first edition of Ulysses?
1,000
One hundred were signed on Dutch handmade paper at 350 francs, and by one scholar's count the edition contained over 2,000 errors.
Q 26In which French city was the first edition of Ulysses printed?
Dijon
The printer, Maurice Darantiere, later reused the same plates for the Egoist Press edition sold in England.
Q 27Which magazine serialised Ulysses in the US from 1918 to 1920, leading to an obscenity conviction?
The Little Review
Its editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were prosecuted after printing the 'Nausicaa' episode, and the Post Office burned copies.
Q 28What does Bloom go out to buy for his breakfast in the 'Calypso' episode?
A mutton kidney
The episode opens by announcing that 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
The house's front door was rescued from demolition and now hangs in the James Joyce Centre.
Q 30Where was Molly Bloom born?
Gibraltar
Her father was Major Tweedy, an Irish officer, and her mother Lunita Laredo was of Spanish descent; a bronze of Molly stands in the Alameda Gardens there.