Leopold Bloom

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Leopold Paula Bloom is a fictional character in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. He is a thirty-eight-year-old advertising agent introduced to us at the very beginning of episode 4 (Calypso) of the novel, with the following words:

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Ulysses is primarily focused on Bloom and the contemporary Odyssey he embarks upon throughout Dublin over the course of the single day of June 16, 1904 (though episodes 1 to 3, as well as 9 and to a lesser extent 7, are more concerned with Stephen Dedalus, who in the plan of the book represents Telemachus to Bloom's Odysseus), the various types of people and themes he encounters. Among Joyce aficionados, June 16th is celebrated as Bloomsday. Throughout the novel Bloom is aware of an affair his wife Molly Bloom is having with her manager Blazes Boylan, and broods about the death of his child, Rudy. We also encounter his chauvinistic attitudes, a penchant for voyeurism and his unfaithful epistolary alter ego, Henry Flower. Writer-director Mel Brooks adopted the name "Leo Bloom" for the mousy accountant in his film/musical The Producers.

Bloom was born in 1866, the only son of Rudolf Virag (a Hungarian Jew from Szombathely who had converted to Protestantism and later committed suicide) and Ellen, an Irish Catholic. He married Molly on 8 October 1888. Bloom and Molly have one daughter, Milly, born 1889; their son Rudy was born in December 1893 but died after eleven days. The family live at 7 Eccles Street.

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