Joyce's first major work, Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories, was published in 1914. They concentrate on the idea of an epiphany, a moment when the main protagonist gains self-awareness or understanding. The stories follow a logical order from childhood to adolescence to maturity and finally death, the last story being entitled "The Dead." "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," an almost complete re-write of an abandoned novel called Stephen Hero was published in 1916. It is a biographical novel depicting the coming of age of a young man, Stephen Dedalus, the fictional alter ego of Joyce.

The book was to pioneer some of Joyce's modernist techniques that would be used widely in his later works, including interior monologue. His only published play, Exiles (1918) was a study of the husband/wife relationship. Joyce began work on his magnum opus, Ulysses, in 1914, completing it in 1921. It was published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company. In Ulysses, Joyce employs the technique of stream of consciousness and the action all takes place on one single day, 16 June 1904. The book consists of eighteen chapters, each roughly covering one hour of the day, beginning around 8am and finishing around 2am the following morning with each of the chapters employing its own literary style.

He began work on Finnegan's Wake in 1923, however progress was slow due mainly to declining health and failing eyesight, it was finally published in 1939. It abandoned all conventions of plot, character construction and the language used is peculiar and obscure.