James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, but exiled himself to Paris at twenty as a rebellion against his upbringing. He only returned to Ireland briefly from the Continent but Dublin was at heart of his greatest works, Ulysees and Finnegans Wake. He lived in poverty until the last ten years of his life and was plagued by near blindness and the grief of his daughter's insanity. He died in 1941.
In 1984 was published the news-capturing scholarly work, the Critical and Synoptic Edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, which, as The New York Times said, corrected almost 5,000 omissions, transpositions and other errors included in previous editions of the seminal 20th-century novel. That remarkable work of scholarship, labor, and love, however, ran to three volumes in heft and rang up at $200 in price. Here, then, comes the single-volume trade-book edition of the same edited and restored text, placing the great novel, in as close to its originally-intended form as can be achieved, within reach of the common reader. Missing only is the vast scholarly apparatus of the longer version, though this one comes with a pleasantly helpful preface by Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann and a methodologically explanatory afterward by Hans Walter Gabler. A welcome event. Publication date, readers will note, is Bloomsday. (Kirkus Reviews)