June 14, 1962 - James Joyce (pictured in 1928), one of Ireland’s most famous writers but one who was long condemned and neglected in his own country, is being honored in Dublin this week and next in grand style. Those who condemned him held that much of Joyce’s writing was obscene and anti-religious. While many countrymen and particularly the Roman Catholic clergy still have serious reservations, Joyce is being read more and more widely in Ireland, and Dublin’s literary community honors him as a genius. On Saturday, the Martello Tower at Sandycove, a seaside area of Dublin, is to be opened as a museum commemorating Joyce by Miss Sylvia Beach, whose Shakespeare & Co. publishing house in Paris first published “Ulysses,” Joyce’s most famous work, in 1922. Saturday is the 58th anniversary of the day on which the events in “Ulysses” took place. To Joyce’s fans, that day is known as “Bloomsday,” for “Ulysses” is a detailed account of how Leopold Bloom, a Dublin advertising salesman, spent June 16, 1904. Some of Joyce’s first editions, portraits, and drawings of him, and a death mask made when he died in Zurich on Jan. 13, 1941, and some of his personal belongings have been placed in the Martello Tower.
