By the time this collection had been accepted by prominent London publisher Grant Richards and shipped off to the printer, Joyce had added still another story, “Two Gallants.” The printer, afraid of liability under England’s strict obscenity laws, informed Richards that the stories contained obscenities and couldn’t be printed. By the next year he had written nine more stories, conceiving of the twelve stories together as a collection to be called Dubliners.

In 1904, when Joyce was still only twenty-two years old, he published three stories- “The Sisters,” “Eveline,” and “After the Race”) in a rather obscure weekly publication called The Irish Homestead. Even his greatest work, Ulysses (1922), was initially banned in Ireland (and other places, including the United States), and it really was not until the 1950s that Joyce started to gain major recognition as a literary artist. Indeed, his work, often openly anti-Catholic and groundbreaking in its frank treatment of sexual themes, was initially considered shocking (to the point of being banned) in Ireland. Sympathetic with the Irish desire to become independent of British rule but unsympathetic to many of the specific attitudes of the Irish Nationalist movement (and to nationalism in general), the young Joyce was something of an outsider to the Irish Literary Revival. One of the most unlikely stories of twentieth-century literature involves the arc through which a young Irishman by the name of James Joyce (writing primarily in Paris, having permanently emigrated from Ireland in 1904) emerged as perhaps the leading figure, not just in modern Irish literature, but in modern literature as a whole.

Dubliners stories