His father, Jack Joyce (whom Richard Ellmann, Joyce's distinguished biographer, described as the 'most gifted reprobate in Ireland') managed, however, to squander most of his wealth by the time James was ten and the family's fortunes began to decline. James was withdrawn from Clongowes and there was less and less money for the family which would eventually include four sons and six daughters.

In 1893 the family was forced to leave the southside of Dublin and travel to the poorer north inner city. For a time, James did not go to school and he spent much of his time exploring the city (which would help later when he used his almost encyclopedic knowledge of Dublin when writing). From this point on, the family moved regularly both because of eviction and to avoid payment of rent.

Fortunately for James, a chance encounter between Jack Joyce and Fr Conmee SJ, headmaster of Belvedere College and former rector of Clongowes, on Mountjoy Square resulted in James and his brothers, Stanislaus and Charles, being admitted to the school for free. That school still functions and can be seen from the Joyce Centre at the bottom of the street. Joyce remained there until 1898 when he would attend another Jesuit institution, the Catholic University (now University College, Dublin) on Stephens Green which had been established by Cardinal Newman and where Gerald Manley Hopkins had taught. Although he would repudiate Catholicism, Joyce remained grateful to his Jesuit teachers: 'From them I have learnt to arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and judge.'

Unsure of what to do after graduating with an indifferent degree, Joyce left for Paris late in 1902 ostensibly to study medicine. To have his voice trained and to become a professional singer was also a possibility. He succeeded at neither and returned home in the spring of 1903 when he heard that his mother was dying.

May Joyce eventually died on 13th August 1903 at the early age of forty-four. Joyce started writing more seriously at this point and what he called 'epicleti' (what would become the 'Epiphanies') was the first result. He had already written a play 'A Brilliant Career' (1900) and collection of poems (1901) which do not survive. In early 1904 he wrote 'A Portrait of the Artist' for the new Dana magazine which was rejected. Soon afterwards, he started expanding that piece into Stephen Hero. In 1904, the first stories of Dubliners were written and published in the Irish Homestead and the Speaker published some poems. The summer of 1904 was also significant because he met Nora Barnacle, the woman who would be a life-long partner and mother of two children, Giorgio and Lucia.

Joyce and Barnacle left Dublin for mainland Europe in October 1904. Joyce would return to Ireland only on three occasions. He had the promise of a teaching post in Zurich. In fact, he did not get a post until he had travelled first to Trieste (then in the Austrian Empire) and then to Pola.

In 1907, Joyce published his first book, a collection of poems called Chamber Music. Although Dubliners was complete in 1907, it was not published until 1914.

Stephen Hero had been greatly changed and rewritten in the intervening years and in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published. A play called Exiles, influenced by Joyce's hero Henrik Ibsen was published in 1918 but has rarely been successful.

Joyce was already working on his masterpiece, Ulysses. He had moved to neutral Switzerland in 1915 to avoid the war and was writing a book which concentrated on one day in the life of Dublin, 16th June 1904 (probably the day he and Nora first went out together). The book is loosely structured on Homer's Odyssey and uses free association of impression or stream of consciousness ('style indirect libre') extensively. It was finished and finally published (on Joyce's 40th birthday in 1922) in Paris. The book was banned in the USA and in England but Joyce was already living largely at this stage on the patronage of Harriet Shaw Weaver.

The next thirteen years Joyce spent writing Work in Progress, what would eventually become Finnegans Wake, a book sometimes termed his revenge on the English language. Although his eyesight was deteriorating steadily Joyce managed to write a book dreamt by a man in one night in a Chapelizod public house. It uses multiple puns in about forty languages and is loosely structured on the Italian philosopher Vico's cyclical history of time. Joyce was again frustrated by war and his book did not get much attention on publication (although sections had been published serially since the 1920s and had been the subject of positive criticism by many including Samuel Beckett). He went again to Zurich to avoid the madness and died there in the morning of 13th January 1941.