Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timeUlysses is one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. It was not easy to find a publisher in America willing to take it on, and when Jane Jeap and Margaret Anderson started printing extracts from the book in their literary magazine
The Little Review in 1918, they were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity. They were fined $100, and even
The New York Times expressed satisfaction with their conviction.
Ulysses was not published in book form until 1922, when another American woman, Sylvia Beach, published it in Paris her Shakespeare & Company.
Ulysses was not available legally in any English-speaking country until 1934, when Random House successfully defended Joyce against obscenity charges and published it in the Modern Library.
This edition follows the complete and unabridged text as corrected and reset in 1961. Judge John Woolsey’s decision lifting the ban against
Ulysses is reprinted, along with a letter from Joyce to Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House, and the original foreword to the book by Morris L. Ernst, who defended
Ulysses during the trial.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Considered the greatest 20th century novel written in English, in this edition Walter Gabler uncovers previously unseen text. It is a disillusioned study of estrangement, paralysis and the disintegration of society.
"Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that
Gargantua immortalized Rabelais, and
The Brothers Karamazov immortalized Dostoyevsky.... It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence."
-
The New York Times"To my mind one of the most significant and beautiful books of our time."
-Gilbert Seldes, in
The Nation"Talk about understanding "feminine psychology"-- I have never read anything to surpass it, and I doubt if I have ever read anything to equal it."
-Arnold Bennett
"In the last pages of the book, Joyce soars to such rhapsodies of beauty as have probably never been equaled in English prose fiction."
-Edmund Wilson, in
The New Republic 
