When Joyce taught English at the Berlitz School in Trieste, one of his pupils was an older Jewish industrialist named Ettore Schmitz, who published under the name Italo Svevo. He became one of Joyce’s closest friends in the city and a source for the main character in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. Svevo, like Bloom, married a Gentile and had what Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann called “an amiably ironic view of life.” Joyce encouraged his student to persevere as a writer. Svevo’s best-known book, La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience), was published one year after Ulysses. In a 1927 lecture, translated later by Joyce’s brother, Svevo describes the feeling among Triestines “that [Joyce] belonged in a certain sense to us.”

Joyce was superstitious about Greece, believing that its citizens (“from noblemen down to onionsellers”) brought him good fortune—so much so, that it would affect Ulysses' book design. Count Francesco Sordina, a Greek aristocrat living in Trieste, enrolled in one of Joyce’s first English classes, elevating his instructor’s standing at the school by recommending the course to other wealthy Triestines. Their friendship endured. After World War One began, Sordina and another nobleman helped Joyce and his family emigrate to Zurich. The author memorialized the day they entered Switzerland by inscribing this book to Sordina: “in gratitude and friendship and in remembrance of 21 June 1915.”

Sexual jealousy and infidelity, themes dramatized in Ulysses, are also portrayed in the play Exiles, Joyce’s least successful work. For years he tried to interest theatrical companies in England, Ireland, and America; there were no takers until August 1919, when Exiles was staged in a German translation in Munich. Joyce summed up the world premiere: “Complete fiasco. Row in theatre. Play withdrawn. Author invited but not present. . . . Thank God.” Exiles was finally performed in English in 1925, at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse.

This rare broadside program relates to an amateur production mounted the following year by notable figures in the burgeoning gay rights and Little Theatre movements in Boston and Provincetown: Prescott Townsend (1894–1973) and Catherine Sargent Huntington (1887–1987), the play's director. The Boston Stage Society’s repertoire in the 1920s featured European plays by Strindberg, Chekhov, Jean Cocteau, and more obscure modern dramatists. Joyce may not have been aware of this production, nor was he likely compensated.

Joyce’s 1903 poem “I Hear an Army” was admired by Irish writer W. B. Yeats, who called it “a technical and emotional masterpiece.” When the poem reappeared in an anthology a decade later, Yeats recommended it to the American poet Ezra Pound. Shown here is Pound’s letter of introduction to Joyce. Before Joyce could answer, Pound wrote again to ask if he could include “I Hear an Army” in the first anthology of Imagist poetry, initially published as a special issue of the American magazine the Glebe. His compliments emboldened Joyce to send Pound Dubliners and the first chapter of his new novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Within a month, thanks to Pound, the serialization of Portrait commenced in the English literary magazine The Egoist.

“When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.
You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
–James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Harriet Shaw Weaver, who took over the editorial reins of the Egoist shortly after Portrait's first excerpts appeared, confronted resistance from the magazine's printers over subsequent extracts from the novel. Similar to the opposition provoked by Dubliners, some of the language and subject matter in Portrait was viewed as unconventional by pressmen and potentially obscene. Weaver, dedicated to publishing Joyce's text exactly as he had written it, had to fire several of her magazine’s printers for their censoring of words such as “ballocks” and references to bodily functions. Those redactions were made after the printers had produced faithful type settings, however, which allowed the New York publisher B. W. Huebsch to restore the language for the book’s first edition in 1916. Weaver started the imprint Egoist Ltd. in order to publish Portrait in England. Although British printers persisted in their unwillingness to involve themselves in Joyce’s controversial work, Weaver was able to issue her edition by binding sheets that had been printed in America.