Dublin

In his inimitable, irresistible way, James Joyce immortalized the city of Dublin in Ulysses, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, filling these works with the people he knew, speaking in their own words, and adding many more of his own. Disappointed with the city's provincial outlook and small-town manners, he left it in 1902, at the age of 20 (his famed peers Sean O'Casey and Samuel Beckett soon followed). Later, he said he chose Dublin as the setting for his work because it was a "center of paralysis" where nothing much ever changed. Which only proves that even the greats get it wrong sometimes. Indeed, if Joyce were to return to his once genteel hometown today and take a quasi-Homeric odyssey through the city (as he so famously does in Ulysses), would he even recognize Dublin as his "Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills"? More »