Long Island, Labor Day weekend, 1955. While Eve Arnold loads a roll of film, the most looked-at woman on the planet takes a battered novel out of her car and starts to read.

By the time the film was loaded, the picture already existed. Arnold just walked over, quietly, and collected it. Marilyn Monroe, alone on a playground carousel, bare feet tucked up, her whole body folded around Ulysses like a comma, not looking at the camera. For Marilyn in 1955, being looked at was the job; in this frame, she's off duty. We're not being performed for. We're overhearing.

And for decades, people could not, would not, believe it. The dumb blonde of the century holding the Everest of modernist literature had to be a prop, a gag, image-laundering. It took until 1993 for a Joyce scholar, Richard Brown, to do the simplest possible thing: write ...