James Joyce's Ulysses, has been described as spiritually offensive, anarchic, and obscene.
When an early excerpt appeared in a Review magazine, the US authorities ordered all copies to be seized and burnt.
Publishers and printers were afraid of being prosecuted for Distributing Joy's controversial work.
But Sylvia Beach, the owner of Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris, took a huge risk and in 1922 Ulysses was published.
In the hundred years since, the book has triumphed over criticism and censorship to become one of the most highly regarded works of art in the 20th century.
Set over the course of a single day Ulysses does not have an epic plot like Moby Dick, nor does it have the tragedy of King Leer.
Instead it is Joyce's storytelling and his use of language, his humor and his generosity of spirit that makes Ulysses a work of genius.
In 1922, Paris was the capital of the art world and home to Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker and many more celebrated artists - including James Joyce.
The world was recovering from the Great War and artists were responding to what TS Elliot called "The immense Panorama of futility and Anarchy which is contemporary history".
Joyce had spent the war at work on his Masterpiece and although the conflict did not influence his output as much as his contemporaries, an echo of falling bombs can be heard in these lines, where the character Stephen Dedalus thinks of the fall of Troy: 1922 was a landmark year for modernist writings with the publication not only of Joyce's Ulysses, but also TS Elliot's "The Wasteland" and Virginia Wolfe's "Jacob's Room".
