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 Bloom and threatened because of his being perceived as a Jew. Richard Ellmann, Joyce's biographer, described Bloom as "a nobody", who "has virtually no effect upon the life around him". In this Ellmann found nobility: "The divine part of Bloom is simply his humanity - his assumption of a bond between himself and other created being." Joyce told Sylvia Beach that Holbrook Jackson resembled Bloom. Writer-director Mel Brooks used the name "Leo Bloom" for the mousy accountant in his film/musical "The Producers". Leo is a nervous accountant, prone to panic attacks, who keeps a security blanket to calm himself. Nevertheless, it