James Joyce wrote Ulysses as an exile and never once in the Dublin it obsesses over. The book was drafted across three cities on the continent while Joyce scraped a living teaching English and dodged a war. He even stamped the itinerary onto the final page.
Trieste, Zurich, Paris
Joyce began Ulysses in Trieste, the Adriatic port where he had spent years teaching English at a Berlitz school and raising his family on almost no money. When the First World War reached the region and Italy entered the conflict in 1915, the port turned dangerous, and Joyce moved the family to neutral Zurich. He wrote through the war years there, in cafes and rented rooms, before settling in Paris in 1920 at Ezra Pound's urging. Paris is where he finished the book and where it was finally printed.
Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921
James Joyce, the closing line of Ulysses
That closing line is not decoration. Joyce treated the three cities as part of the work, a record of the road the book traveled while he wrote it. To see how the writing itself worked in those rented rooms, read the full James Joyce writing routine.
Writing Dublin From a Distance
The strange part is the subject. Every street and shopfront in Ulysses belongs to Dublin on a single day in June 1904, yet Joyce reconstructed all of it from memory and letters hundreds of miles away. He wrote home for details, pored over maps and a copy of Thom's Dublin directory, and once asked his aunt to confirm whether a man could lower himself over the area railings of a particular house. The city on the page is exact. The city outside his window never was.
- Trieste: where the book began, during his Berlitz teaching years
- Zurich: the wartime refuge where much of it was drafted
- Paris: where he finished it and where Sylvia Beach published it in 1922
What You Can Steal
- You can write a place you have left. Distance gave Joyce focus, and memory, letters, and a good map did the rest.
- Check the small facts. Joyce wrote home to confirm railings and shopfronts. That precision is what made the imagined city feel real.
- Keep working through disruption. A war moved him twice, and the draft survived it.
- Let the work travel with you. Three cities, one book. The writing goes where you go.