JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941)

Like several other books in this exhibition, James Joyce's Ulysses was embroiled in a famous and lengthy censorship battle. Ulysses, Joyce's eighth published book, was first published serially in the American literary magazine, The Little Review, from March 1918 to December 1920. The magazine's editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, fought to prevent suppression of Joyce's work on grounds of obscenity and immorality. In the end, however, the censors won a court order against Anderson and Heap, restraining them from any further printing of Ulysses.

Two years later, with the aid of his friend Ezra Pound, Joyce was able to interest Sylvia Beach and her publishing firm, Shakespeare and Company, in his controversial, modernist novel. On February 2, 1922, Ulysses was published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris through the printing services of Maurice Darantiere at Dijon. It was not until December 6,1933, that the ban on Ulysses was lifted in the United States.

The copy exhibited is the first edition issued in Paris, in its original blue printed wrappers. This edition is number 295 of a limited 1,000 copies on handmade paper. Other important editions housed in the Special Collections of the University of Delaware Library include the second edition, published for the Egoist Press of London by John Rodker (Paris, October 1922), printed from the same plates and in the original format; the ninth printing (Shakespeare and Company, 1927), from which the pirated editions that circulated in the United States in 1927-1928 were forged; the New York: Random House, 1934 edition, the first authorized American edition of Ulysses and the New York: Limited Editions Club, 1935 edition, with illustrations by Henri Matisse and signed by the artist.