Ulysses is considered a modernist masterpiece, funny, sorrowful, and blasphemous. Through the book's stream-of-consciousness technique we're privy to the thoughts, emotions, and memories of, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Nearly every variety of human experience is crammed into a single day in their life. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses, a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected.