Also in 1904, while teaching school in Ireland, Joyce published stories in The Irish Homestead and began a novel, Stephen Hero, that would eventually metamorphose into A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Though unmarried to Nora Barnacle, he left Ireland with her and they traveled together to Europe, where he taught languages in the Berlitz School in Yugoslavia and then in Trieste, Italy, where their son Giorgio was born. In 1906 Joyce, Nora, and Giorgio moved to Rome, where he worked in a bank, and the following year his collected poems, called Chamber Music, were published in London. Also during this time, his daughter Lucia was born.
In 1909 Joyce visited Ireland, where he opened a movie theater in Dublin with the help of some European investors; he also signed a contract for the publication of Dubliners. In 1912 he visited Ireland again, this time with his family; the book would not be published until two years later, in London. Also in 1914, Joyce’s first completed novel, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, was serialized in the London magazine The Egoist. He began writing Ulysses at this time.
The Joyces moved in 1915 to Switzerland. The following year, A Portrait was published in New York. In 1918, his poorly received play, Exiles, was published in London. It was also that year that chapters from Ulysses, his novel-in-progress, began to appear in the American journal The Little Review. Publication of the completed book would not occur until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the already famous new book.
The writer’s Pomes Pennyeach was published in 1927; four years later, Joyce and Nora were married in London, already having lived together for over a quarter of a century. In 1933, a New York judge ruled that Ulysses was not pornographic; until that time, it had been banned in the United States as obscene. A year later, Random House published the novel, and five years after that, in 1939, Finnegans Wake appeared.
Joyce died at the age of 59 on January 13, 1941, in Zurich, where he was buried.
