DublinersDubliners

Dubliners was completed in 1905, but a series of British and Irish publishers and printers found it offensive and immoral, and it was suppressed.nbsp;nbsp;The book finally came out in London in 1914, just as Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to appear in the journal Egoist under the auspices of Ezra Pound.nbsp;nbsp;The first three stories in Dubliners might be incidents from a draft of Portrait of the Artist , and many of the characters who figure in Ulysses have their first appearance here, but this is not a book of interest only because of its relationship to Joyce's life and mature work.nbsp;nbsp;It is one of the greatest story collections in the English language--an unflinching, brilliant, often tragic portrait of early twentieth-century Dublin.nbsp;nbsp;The book, which begins and ends with a death, moves from "stories of my childhood" through tales of public life.nbsp;nbsp;Its larger purpose, Joyce said, was as a moral history of Ireland.