To mark the centenary of the groundbreaking novels first edition, the Morgan Library and Museum presents One Hundred Years of James Joyces Ulysses, running through Oct. 2. Curated by the noted Irish author Colm Tibn, the exhibition explores the trajectory of Joyces life and career from lyric poet to modernist genius and illuminates the authors creative process through rare publications, portraits, correspondence, manuscripts, plans, and proofs, many of which are reunited for the first time in a century. It considers key figures from Joyces biography that inform the creation of Ulysses, such as Joyces father, John Stanislaus Joyce, and his wife, Nora Barnacle, as well as those instrumental in realizing its publication, such as Harriet Shaw Weaver, Margaret Anderson, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach. The exhibition also looks at artists and writers who responded to the novel, as well as the censorship that attended its publication in the U.S. Ulysses was first published in book form on Feb. 2, 1922. Set on one day, June 16, 1904, the novel follows the young poet Stephen Dedalus and the unlikely hero Leopold Bloom on a journey through Dublin. The landmark work links the epic to the ordinary, connecting characters and motifs from Homers ancient Greek poem, the Odyssey, with everyday life in Joyces hometown. Written in self-imposed exile between 1914 and 1921 in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, Ulysses invokes the atmosphere and the topography of 1904 Dublin in astonishing and meticulous detail. On its publication in Paris a century ago, the novel expanded the limits of language and genre, and not without controversy. Censored and banned in America and England for obscenity, Ulysses became the catalyst for new legal standards of artistic freedom. One Hundred Years of James Joyces Ulysses draws on items from the Morgans Sean and Mary Kelly Collection, including inscribed copies of the authors works, rare publications and broadsides, a manuscript fragment, and Joyces typewritten schema of the Homeric structure of Ulysses. Major contributions from the James Joyce Collection, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, and additional institutional loans include the first and last pages of the manuscript, proofs on which part of the novel was written, and rarely seen letters between Joyce and Nora Barnacle. Also featured are textual and visual responses by figures such as Virginia Woolf, George Antheil, Henri Matisse, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ralph Ellison. The 2018 gift to the Morgan of the Sean and Mary Kelly Collection of James Joyce has inspired this project, enabling us to celebrate one of the most daring and controversial literary works in the English language. I can think of no one better to spearhead our efforts than Colm Tibn, who, among many other accomplishmenbts, is a leading expert on Joyce, said The Morgans director, Colin B. Bailey. The Morgan Library and Museum is located at 225 Madison Ave. at 36th St., New York, N.Y. For further information, visit www.themorgan.org.