The Odyssey did not arrive from a single author sitting down to compose it. It took shape through generations of oral poets working in a formulaic tradition, repeating and recombining set phrases and episodes across many performances long before the poem was fixed in writing, probably in the eighth or seventh century BCE. Homer, if the name refers to one person at all, is best understood as a name attached to a tradition of composition rather than proof of sole authorship, and the poem's repeated epithets and stock scenes are the fingerprints of that oral method.
Whether the Trojan War behind Odysseus's wanderings reflects a real conflict of the Late Bronze Age, and how much the excavated site at Hisarlik in modern Turkey has to do with it, remains debated rather than settled, with archaeology confirming a destroyed city in roughly the right period but not the specific war or heroes.
Odysseus's later reputation shifted sharply with his audience: Greek tradition prized his cunning as heroic resourcefulness, Roman writers reworked him as the devious Ulysses whose trickery cost Troy its innocence, and Dante placed him among the false counsellors in Hell for exactly the cleverness Homer had celebrated, a reversal that shows how the same character can be read as hero or villain depending entirely on who is doing the reading.