Leopold Bloom

Leopold Bloom
Ulysses character
Drawing of Leopold Bloom by Joyce
Created by	James Joyce
Information
Nickname(s)	Poldy
Aliases	Henry Flower
Occupation	Advertising agent
Family	Rudolph Bloom (né Rudolf Virág) (father) Ellen Bloom (née Higgins) (mother)
Spouse(s)	Marion (Molly) Tweedy (m. 1888)
Children	Millicent (Milly) Bloom (b. 1889) Rudolph (Rudy) Bloom (b. 1893 – d. 1893)
Religion	Born Jewish Raised Protestant Converted to Catholicism, 1888

Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. The character was inspired by James Joyce's close friend Aron Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo), author of Zeno's Conscience.

Bloom is introduced to the reader as a man of appetites:

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.

The Bloom character, born in 1866, is the only son of Rudolf Virág (a Hungarian Jew from Szombathely who emigrated to Ireland, converted from Judaism to Protestantism, changed his name to Rudolph Bloom and later committed suicide), and of Ellen Higgins, an Irish Protestant.He may have been born in Subotica(in present-day Serbia) He is uncircumcised. They lived in Clanbrassil Street, Portobello. Bloom converted to Catholicism to marry Marion (Molly) Tweedy on 8 October 1888. The couple have one daughter, Millicent (Milly), born in 1889; their son Rudolph (Rudy), born in December 1893, died after 11 days. The family live at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin.

Episodes (chapters) in Ulysses relate a series of encounters and incidents in Bloom's contemporary odyssey through Dublin in the course of the single day of 16 June 1904 (although episodes 1 to 3, 9 and to a lesser extent 7, are primarily concerned with Stephen Dedalus, who in the plan of the story is the counterpart of Telemachus). Joyce aficionados celebrate 16 June as 'Bloomsday'.