Joyce's first major published work is Dubliners, released in 1914, a slim volume of 15 short stories exploring Dublin’s culture. This was followed, in 1916, by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a substantial rewrite of a work he had begun more than a decade earlier, and which serves as a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. His final major work was the novel Finnegan's Wake, published in 1939, a difficult stream of consciousness novel written in a peculiar, idiosyncratic language which alienated many of the critics who had come to love him.
There is no doubt, though, that his masterpiece is Ulysses, published in 1922. The story of Leopold Bloom took fifteen years to mature from a notion to a manuscript; Joyce had set as a deadline his 40th birthday. The story takes place in a single day--now celebrated as the first Bloomsday, June 16 1904--with eighteen chapters covering about an hour each. Each chapter is written in its own style, referencing a specific episode of Homer's Odyssey--with Leopold Bloom standing in for Ulysses, Molly Bloom for Penelope, and Portrait's Stephen Dedalus for Telemachus--and employs techniques ranging from stream of consciousness to crude jokes.
