Dubliners is James Joyce's first published book of fiction. It is a collection of fifteen short stories about ordinary characters in Dublin in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The themes are childhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age. Some of the stories first appeared in an Irish magazine in 1904, under the pseudonym "Stephen Dedalus." The last and most famous story, "The Dead," was finished in 1907, but publication of the book was delayed until 1914.

The character Stephen Dedalus also appears in Joyce's 1922 novel, Ulysses, a classic of literary modernism. The action is set in a single day, June 16, 1904 (the date on which Joyce met his future wife, Nora Barnacle). The story follows Stephen, a newspaper advertising salesman named Leopold Bloom, and Bloom's wife Molly as they go about their business in Dublin. This elaborately structured novel parallels Homer's classic epic The Odyssey...