In 1905, the young James Joyce, then only twenty-three years old, sent a manuscript of twelve short stories to an English publisher. Delays in publishing gave Joyce ample time to add three accomplished stories over the next two years: "Two Gallants," "A Little Cloud," and "The Dead" were added later. Although the stories were powerful, revolutionary work, Dubliners was not published until 1914. The delay was due to concern about the frank sexual content (which, by today's standards, is quite mild) and some of the charged political and social issues addressed in the collection.

Dubliners is the first-born of Joyce's central canon (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake). Though now considered a masterpiece, its delayed publication altered its public reception. Though Joyce was astonishingly young (twenty-five years of age at the time of the completion of "The Dead"), the collection never saw print until he was thirty-three years old. By that time, Joyce was already publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in serial form in The Egoist. The stream-of-consciousness experiments of Portrait and Ulysses attracted for more attention than the more straightforward narrative style in Joyce's short stories. For many years, the magnificent accomplishment in Dubliners was eclipsed by Joyce's experimental novels.