Several of Joyce's siblings joined them, and two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born. A short stint in Rome as a bank clerk ended in illness, and Joyce returned to Trieste. In 1907 Joyce published a collection of poems, CHAMBER MUSIC. The title was suggested, Joyce later stated, by the sound of urine tinkling into a prostitute's chamber pot. In 1909 Joyce opened a cinema in Dublin, but this affair failed and he was soon back in Trieste, still broke and working as a teacher, tweed salesman, journalist and lecturer. In 1912 he was in Ireland, trying to persuade Maunsel & Co to fulfill their contract to publish DUBLINERS. The contained a series of short stories, dealing with the lives of ordinary people. The stories deal progressively with youth, adolescence, young adulthood and maturity. "But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad." (from Dubliners)
Nothing was accomplished, and it was Joyce's last journey to his home country. However, Dubliners was published in 1914 and Joyce had became friends with Ezra Pound, who began to market Joyce's works. In 1916 appeared Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an autobiographical novel. The book follows the life of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, from childhood towards maturity, his education at University College, Dublin and rebellion to free himself from the claims of family, church and state. At the end Stephen resolves to leave Ireland for Paris to encounter 'the reality of experience'.
There once was a lounger named Stephen
Whose youth was most odd and uneven
--He throve on the smell
--Of a horrible hell
That a Hottentot wouldn't believe in. (Joyce's limerick on the book's protagonist)
At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich, where Lenin and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara had found their refuge. In Zürich Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, which was first published in France because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States.