The action of the novel, famously, occurs on a single day, 16 June 1904, coincidentally the date of Joyce's first outing with Nora Barnacle, later his beloved wife. Ulysses began as a discarded chapter from Joyce's first collection, Dubliners (1914) and for all its length it retains the fierce intimacy of a great short story. Occasionally, it is said that English-language fiction since 1922 has been a series of footnotes to Joyce's masterpiece. Today, novelists writing a hundred years after the composition of Ulysses still write in the shadow of this extraordinary achievement. He wrote: "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning."
His answer to the challenge of the 20th century was to declare independence. Earlier, in his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he had made an unforgettable declaration of artistic intent.
By then, James Joyce had already seen Ulysses, a text of approximately 265,000 words, privately published in Paris by Sylvia Beach, the philanthropic proprietor of the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, after a tortuous gestation in which his novel had been prosecuted for obscenity, and almost hounded into oblivion. TS Eliot's The Waste Land appeared, first in magazine and then in volume form towards the end of the year. 1922 is one of those extraordinary years in the history of English literature – the moment when Modernism came of age, and after which nothing would ever be the same again.
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