For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own, sell, advertise, or purchase in the United States. James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. In this exultant literary history, Harvard lecturer Birmingham recounts the remarkable publication saga of Ulysses, often considered the greatest novel of the 20th century. Even before its publication in 1922, Ulysses outraged government censors on both sides of the Atlantic, with its obscenities, masturbation, and adulterous sex. - Publishers Weekly. What begins as simply the "biography of a book" morphs into an absorbing, deeply researched, and accessible guide to the history of modern thought in the first two decades of the 20th century through the lens of Joyce's innovative fiction. - Library Journal.