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Background

Joyce first encountered Odysseus in Charles Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses - an adaptation of the Odyssey for children, which seemed to establish the Roman name in Joyce's mind. At school he wrote an essay on Ulysses as his 'favourite hero'.^[5] Joyce told Frank Budgen that he considered Ulysses the only all-round character in literature.^[6] He thought about calling Dubliners by the name Ulysses in Dublin,^[7] but the idea grew from a story in Dubliners in 1906, to a 'short book' in 1907,^[8] to the vast novel which he began writing in 1914.