Great Books Explained

Even before James Joyce’s Ulysses was published it was causing trouble. Short excerpts appeared in a review magazine, and the US postal service claiming it was pornography refused to deliver the magazines and then burnt all the copies. Any publisher that thought about publishing Ulysses had to weigh up the possibility of being prosecuted for obscenity against the potential of bringing a masterpiece into the world. Most publishers wouldn’t touch it, but Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare and Co. bookshop in Paris, decided the risk was worth taking, and in 1922 Ulysses was published in Paris. It is famously hard to read, and many never finish it, but the novel would go on to triumph over the criticism and censorship, to become one of the most highly regarded works of art in the 20th century. Nothing much happens in Ulysses, two men wander around Dublin, and a woman lies in bed thinking. But it is the story telling, the language and the humour that makes it a work of genius.

As internet users, we all understand the expression “Going Down a Rabbit Hole”, which comes from the much-loved book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The book famously begins when the main character, Alice, follows a white rabbit underground, and finds herself going deeper and deeper into a strange world - somewhere in which normal social rules, and even laws of physics, are suspended.

This is a story about the American Dream. No other decade defined America like the 1920s. The country was coming into its own and fulfilling its promise of freedom and prosperity, but already the dream was showing its cracks, and the decade that followed would test America to its very core. One book would serve as a prophetic warning to its audience and still offer a glimmer of hope about the American ideal.