James Joyce Trivia
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59 free James Joyce trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
51 free James Joyce trivia questions with answers. James Joyce wrote one of the most celebrated novels of the twentieth century and one of the least read, and this quiz covers both. Fifty-one questions run from his birth in Rathgar and the Jesuit schools of Clongowes and Belvedere through the first walk with Nora, the years teaching English in Trieste, wartime Zurich and the Paris of Sylvia Beach and Ezra Pound, to his death in 1941 and the grave that Ireland declined to bring home. The books get their due: the fifteen stories of Dubliners and 'The Dead', the fire that nearly ate the Portrait manuscript, Bloom's kidney and Molly's unpunctuated monologue, the American judge who ruled Ulysses was 'emetic' but not obscene, the seventeen years spent on Finnegans Wake, and the physicist who lifted 'quark' from it. Easy questions ask when Bloomsday falls; hard ones want the name of the printer in Dijon and the price of Pomes Penyeach. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Joyce, his works and his circle, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Dublin suburb was James Joyce born in 1882?
Rathgar
Rathgar's 41 Brighton Square was his first home, but by 1891 John Joyce's drinking and financial mismanagement had started the family's slide into poverty.
Q 02On what date is Bloomsday celebrated each year?
16 June
16 June is the day in 1904 on which Ulysses is set; the first organised pilgrimage, in 1954, set off in horse-drawn cabs but was abandoned halfway as its writers got too drunk.
Q 03Joyce's Ulysses was published on which day?
His birthday
His birthday, his fortieth, was the day the book appeared in 1922, but readers in Britain had a long wait: Ulysses stayed banned there until 1936.
Q 04Ulysses parallels the episodes of which ancient epic poem?
The Odyssey
The Odyssey gives the novel its frame, with ironic twists: Homer's hero takes ten years to get home to a faithful wife, while Joyce's is out for a single day as his wife takes a lover.
Q 05Joyce underwent more than a dozen operations on which part of his body?
His eyes
His eyes plagued him for the rest of his life after an illness in 1907, and the surgery took him abroad again and again in his later years.
Q 06Which narrative technique is Joyce's Ulysses most closely associated with?
Stream of consciousness
Stream of consciousness sets down a character's thoughts as they flow; Joyce said he owed the method to the French novelist Édouard Dujardin, whose novel he had picked up in 1903.
Q 07Which Dubliners story sends a lovesick boy to a bazaar?
Araby
Araby, third of the fifteen stories, leaves its narrator empty-handed among the darkening stalls; Joyce set it on North Richmond Street, where his own family lived when he was a schoolboy.
Q 08In which city was Ulysses first published as a complete book?
Paris
Paris was the place: no English or American printer would touch it, so a small Left Bank bookshop became the book's publisher for the occasion.
Q 09Which bookshop owner first published Ulysses as a complete book?
Sylvia Beach
Sylvia Beach, the American owner of Shakespeare and Company, which had opened only in 1919, offered to publish the book after watching Joyce fail to find anyone else.
Q 10What is the title of Joyce's only surviving play, first staged in 1919?
Exiles
Exiles was turned down for Dublin's Abbey Theatre by W. B. Yeats and found no stage in Britain or America, so it opened in Munich in August 1919, to poor reviews.
Q 11Which word opens Finnegans Wake, completing the sentence its last page leaves unfinished?
riverrun
riverrun, in lower case, finishes the sentence that the book's final words leave hanging, so the Wake reads as an endless loop; Joyce kept its real title secret until it was published in 1939.
Q 12Which physicist borrowed the word 'quark' from Finnegans Wake?
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann lifted 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!' from Finnegans Wake in 1963; the line suited him because his quarks came in threes, and he chose to pronounce it 'kwork'.
Q 13Which Christian feast gave Joyce his name for the brief scenes he collected for his fiction?
Epiphany
Q 21Joyce set Ulysses on the date of which event?
His first outing with Nora
His first outing with Nora, a walk through the Dublin suburb of Ringsend, is traditionally dated to that day, six days after they met; admirers now mark the date every year as Bloomsday.
Q 22In which town or city was Joyce's wife Nora born?
Galway
Galway was Nora's birthplace in 1884; her memories of local boys who courted her and died young are thought to lie behind Michael Furey, the lost love in Joyce's most famous short story.
Q 23In which city's register office did Joyce and Nora finally marry in 1931, after 27 years together?
London
London was chosen largely because Joyce wanted his will and his children's inheritance to stand under English law; the couple wed at Kensington register office on 4 July 1931.
Epiphany became Joyce's word for a moment when an ordinary scene suddenly shows its meaning; in Ulysses a young writer mocks his old plan to have copies of his own sent to all the great libraries of the world.
Q 14Which young Irishman helped Joyce research his last book before winning fame as a playwright?
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett, then a young lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure, also took down passages at Joyce's dictation; their friendship cooled after he rebuffed the affections of Joyce's daughter Lucia.
Q 15Which American poet became Joyce's champion, getting A Portrait of the Artist serialised in The Egoist?
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound first wrote to Joyce in December 1913 on Yeats's advice, asking to reprint one of his poems in the anthology Des Imagistes, and then placed A Portrait in The Egoist in 1914.
Q 16In which Austro-Hungarian port city did Joyce live for most of the years 1905 to 1915?
Trieste
Trieste was where Joyce taught English and finished Dubliners and A Portrait; he stayed until 1915, when Italy's entry into the First World War sent him, a British subject, to neutral Switzerland.
Q 17What is the title of the last and longest story in Dubliners?
The Dead
The Dead, at nearly 16,000 words, is sometimes called a novella; it ends with Gabriel Conroy watching the snow fall on the living and the dead, and John Huston filmed it in 1987 as his final movie.
Q 18Which Jesuit boarding school did the six-year-old Joyce enter in 1888?
Clongowes Wood College
Clongowes Wood College, in County Kildare, took him in 1888 at six and a half; he left in 1891 when the family could no longer pay the fees, and the school opens A Portrait of the Artist.
Q 19Which American judge ruled in December 1933 that Ulysses was not obscene?
John M. Woolsey
John M. Woolsey, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, ruled on 6 December 1933; his opinion conceded the book was in places 'somewhat emetic' but nowhere an aphrodisiac.
Q 20Which US publisher deliberately had a copy of Ulysses seized by Customs to set up the 1933 test case?
Random House
Random House, under Bennett Cerf, imported a copy in 1932 so that lawyer Morris Ernst could force a test case; Customs waved the parcel through and had to be asked to seize it.
Q 24Which word ends Ulysses, closing Molly Bloom's soliloquy?
Yes
Yes, with a capital Y, ends the book as Molly recalls accepting her husband's proposal; Joyce called it 'the female word' and let her speak the last of his eighteen episodes alone.
Q 25In which French city was the first edition of Ulysses printed?
Dijon
Dijon was home to Maurice Darantiere's press, where only one of the typesetters knew English, and the first edition came out peppered with misprints.
Q 26Which magazine serialised Ulysses in the US from 1918 to 1920, leading to an obscenity conviction?
The Little Review
The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, ran Ulysses in instalments until the 'Nausicaa' episode brought a 1921 obscenity conviction; the Post Office had already seized several issues.
Q 27From which Dorset Street pork butcher does Bloom buy his breakfast kidney in 'Calypso'?
Dlugacz
Dlugacz, the pork butcher, sells a pork kidney to the half-Jewish Bloom; the episode opens by noting that he ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
Q 28At what Dublin address do Leopold and Molly Bloom live?
7 Eccles Street
7 Eccles Street was a real house on Dublin's north side; it was later pulled down, but its front door was rescued and now stands in the James Joyce Centre's courtyard.
Q 29Where was Molly Bloom born?
Gibraltar
Gibraltar: Molly was born there in 1870 to Major Tweedy and Lunita Laredo, and Ulysses closes on her memory of being kissed under its Moorish Wall.
Q 30What is unusual about the final 'Penelope' episode of Ulysses?
It has no punctuation
It has no punctuation apart from two full stops, across eight enormous 'sentences'; Nora's own letters ran on in much the same unpunctuated way.