
Exposición Museo Joyce, Comuna de Trieste, Italia
Some writers are born before their time. Others when the time has passed. Timing is everything.
James Joyce’s Ulysses was partially serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920. London publishers didn’t consider the work quite good enough to be included in their lists and the manuscript finally found its way into a limited edition in Paris with financial support from friends and the American-born publisher Sylvia Beach. It rolled off the press on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, and is considered one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century.
On my bookshelf there is a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. After receiving a string of polite rejections for his picaresque novel – the politeness makes it worse, a cloud of depression darkened his mind in and in 1969, at the age of 31, he committed suicide. Toole’s mother, Thelma, salvaged the carbon copy of the manuscript and spent eleven years contacting publishers before her son’s novel was finally accepted by Louisiana State University Press in 1980. It came out with a 2.500 initial print run, was an instant classic, earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1981 and eventually sold more than 1.5 million copies.
Toole in A Confederacy of Dunces set out to explain life’s vicissitudes and interpret the modern world from his unique point of view. Similarly, Joyce in Ulysses addresses the changing attitudes towards tradition and family life in 1920’s Ireland. Both writers were looking into the future with feelings of uncertainty and gloom. Their works were rejected by the mainstream media, not through specific inadequacies, but because they identified quirks and transformations in society unnoticed by busy editors in their glass windowed ivory towers.
The unspoken secret for every writer is to be born in time.

He met actress Carol White in Hollywood and wrote her memoirs, Carol Comes Home. It was the first of a dozen books as a ghostwriter, including the Sunday Times bestseller Today I’m Alice – the story of multiple personality disorder survivor Alice Jamieson. His latest book, “How to Rob the Bank of England”, was published in September 2024.
www.cliffordthurlow.com