Leopold Bloom Leopold Bloom 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's name and some of his personality was inspired by James Joyce's friend Leopold Popper. Popper was a Jew of Bohemian descent who had hired Joyce as an English tutor for his daughter Amalia. Popper managed the company of Popper and Blum and it is believed that Leopold Bloom was invented by taking Popper's first name and Anglicizing
Leopold and Loeb form, but offered Levin a chance to contribute to his own memoir, which was in progress. Levin, unhappy with that suggestion, went ahead with his book alone, despite Leopold's express objections. The novel, titled "Compulsion", was published in 1956. Levin portrayed Leopold (under the pseudonym Judd Steiner) as a brilliant but deeply disturbed teenager, psychologically driven to kill because of his troubled childhood and an obsession with Loeb. Leopold later wrote that reading Levin's book made him "... physically sick ... More than once I had to lay the book down and wait for the nausea to subside. I felt