As he and Nora and then their two children moved among and around European cities — Pola, Trieste, Zurich, Rome, Paris — Joyce found clerical and teaching jobs that provided subsistence to his family and his writing. His first published book of fiction, Dubliners (1914), contained 15 stories short on conventional plots but long on evocative atmosphere and language. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) provided a remarkably objective and linguistically complex account of Stephen Dedalus, i.e. James Joyce, from his birth to his decision to leave Dublin in pursuit of his art.

Portrait did not sell well enough to relieve Joyce's chronic financial worries, but his work by then had attracted the attention of a number of influential avant-gardists, most notably the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound, who believed a new century demanded new art, poetry, fiction, music — everything. Such supporters rallied to promote Joyce and his experimental writings, and he did not disappoint them.

He began Ulysses in 1914; portions of it in progress appeared in the Egoist in England and the Little Review in the U.S., until the Post Office, on grounds of alleged obscenity, confiscated three issues containing Joyce's excerpts and fined the editors $100. The censorship flap only heightened curiosity about Joyce's forthcoming book. Even before Ulysses was published, critics were comparing Joyce's breakthroughs to those of Einstein and Freud.

With so many traditional methods of narrative abandoned, what was left? Perhaps the clearest and most concise description of Joyce's technique came from the critic Edmund Wilson: "Joyce has attempted in Ulysses to render as exhaustively, as precisely and as directly as it is possible in words to do, what our participation in life is like — or rather, what it seems to us like as from moment to moment we live."

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