<b>Dubliners</b> was completed in 1905, but a series of British and Irish publishers and printers found it offensive and immoral, and it was suppressed.  The book finally came out in London in 1914, just as Joyce's <b>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</b> began to appear in the journal <b>Egoist</b> under the auspices of Ezra Pound.  The first three stories in <b>Dubliners</b> might be incidents from a draft of <b>Portrait of the Artist</b>, and many of the characters who figure in <b>Ulysses</b> have their first appearance here, but this is not a book of interest only because of its relationship to Joyce's life and mature work.  It is one of the greatest story collections in the English language--an unflinching, brilliant, often tragic portrait of early twentieth-century Dublin.  The book, which begins and ends with a death, moves from "stories of my childhood" through tales of public life.  Its larger purpose, Joyce said, was as a moral history of Ireland.