A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man

First published in 1916, ‘A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man’ is the first novel and the semi-autobiographical portrayal of James Joyce, an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, and literary critic. Joyce is regarded as one of the most effective and significant writers of the 20th century.
This recounts James Joyce’s early upbringing as an Irish Catholic in late 19th century and early 20th century Dublin. Joyce administers the strict realism which he originally planned in favor of the use of free indirect speech. The novel’s central figure is Stephen Dedalus, whose life is shown in its various stages starting in childhood and moving through early adulthood. It is a proficient portrayal of the process of self-discovery and revolt against authority that is signifying of youth, one which would demonstrate Joyce as a central figure of the modernist literary movement.

James Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the twentieth century. Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.
James Joyce was born in Dublin, on February 2, 1882, as the son of John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman, who had failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of professions, including politics and tax collecting. Joyce's mother, Mary Jane Murray, was ten years younger than her husband. She was an accomplished pianist, whose life was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. In spite of their poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class facade.
From the age of six, Joyce was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College, at Clane, and then at Belvedere College in Dublin (1893-97). In 1898 he entered the University College, Dublin. Joyce's first publication was an essay on Ibsen's play 'When We Dead Awaken'. It appeared in the 'Fortnightly Review' in 1900. At this time he also began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902, the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, teacher and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a year in France, returning when a telegram arrived saying his mother was dying. Not long after her death, Joyce was traveling again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid who he married in 1931.
Joyce published 'Dubliners' in 1914, 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' in 1916, a play 'Exiles' in 1918 and 'Ulysses' in 1922. In 1907 Joyce had published a collection of poems, 'Chamber Music'.
At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich. 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, where the book became legally available only in 1933. In March 1923 Joyce started his second major work, 'Finnegans Wake', suffering at the same time chronic eye troubles caused by glaucoma. The first segment of the novel appeared in Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review in April 1924, as part of what Joyce called Work in Progress. The final version was published in 1939.