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
Molly Bloom is hard to distinguish between a chunk of one of Nora's letters and a chunk of Molly's final monologue". Some research also points to another possible model for Molly in Amalia Popper, one of Joyce's students to whom he taught English while living in Trieste. Amalia Popper was the daughter of a Jewish businessman named Leopoldo Popper, who had worked for a European freight forwarding company (Adolf Blum & Popper) founded in 1875 in its headquarters in Hamburg by Adolf Blum, after whom Leopold Bloom was named. In the (now published) manuscript "Giacomo Joyce", are images and themes Joyce used