In 1915, after the outbreak of World War I, Joyce moved his family to Zurich, and there he finished A Portrait and received welcome assistance from such literary notables as William Butler Yeats and an American exile, Ezra Pound, both of whom were instrumental in A Portrait's being published in serial form in The Egoist. The first installment appeared in 1914, on Joyce's birthday, February 2. The publication of A Portrait as a single volume met with difficulties, and it was only with the help of two literary patronesses, Harriet Shaw Weaver and Edith Rockefeller McCormick, that it was finally published by B. W. Huebsch in New York in 1916, and later in England by Miss Weaver's newly formed Egoist Press, in 1917. Coincidentally, Dubliners was also published in 1914, by Grant Richards.
In August of 1917, Joyce began to undergo a series of eye operations, surgery which would continue throughout the next fifteen years. He sustained his creative enthusiasm, nonetheless, and the serial publication of his new work, Ulysses, appeared in the Little Review in 1918 and continued through 1920.
This enormous novel, loosely structured in episodes akin to Homer's Odyssey, takes place during the course of a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, and a now-matured Stephen Dedalus. Ulysses revolutionized the notion of what a novel was; never before had a writer so challenged the elasticity of the English language. Immediately, critical debate raged regarding Ulysses' literary merit, and eventually the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice lodged an official complaint against the Little Review for publishing obscene material, which it identified with references to specific episodes. The result of this suit deemed Ulysses virtually unpublishable until Sylvia Beach, through her Shakespeare and Company bookstore, decided to undertake the production of the novel. It appeared on February 2, 1922.
