James Joyce left Dublin at twenty-two and never lived there again, yet he spent the rest of his life writing about nothing else. Ulysses recreated a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — in such obsessive, encyclopedic detail that scholars have used it to reconstruct streets, shops, and tram routes that no longer exist. The man who fled his hometown rebuilt it on paper, word by word, from exile.

This episode traces Joyce from his Jesuit education and youthful rebellion through the publication of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, the obscenity trials surrounding Ulysses, and the seventeen years of near-blindness he spent writing Finnegans Wake.

• Joyce’s Dublin upbringing, his break with the Catholic Church, and his self-imposed exile
• The writing of Ulysses and the obscenity trials that made it the most famous banned book in history
• The stream-of-consciousness technique that rewrote the rules of the novel
• Seventeen years of deteriorating eyesight spent writing Finnegans Wake in Paris