Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookshop published the complete edition of 'Ulysses' in Paris, delivering Joyce's dense, stream-of-consciousness reimagining of Homer's Odyssey set across a single day in Dublin. The novel had been serialized and then suppressed in the United States after obscenity charges, and it remained banned there until a landmark 1933 court ruling lifted the prohibition.
Joyce insisted the book appear precisely on his 40th birthday, and Sylvia Beach scrambled to make it happen, having the first two copies rushed from the Dijon printer to Paris by train, with one delivered to Joyce's apartment just hours before his birthday dinner. He reportedly displayed it in his shop window still warm from the press.
The novel's explicit interior monologues, particularly Molly Bloom's unpunctuated closing soliloquy, had already gotten installments of the book seized and burned by U.S. postal authorities during its serialization in The Little Review. Beach, an American expatriate bookseller, took the financial risk no mainstream publisher would touch, printing 1,000 copies through subscription sales alone.
The book's radical narrative techniques — interior monologue, shifting styles chapter to chapter, obsessive Dublin specificity — reordered the possibilities of the novel form for the rest of the twentieth century, influencing everyone from Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner despite, or because of, its notoriety.