A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' was ranked by Modern Library as the third greatest English-language novel of the 20th century. It is a semi-autobiographical novel chronicling the spiritual and intellectual awakening and rebellion of Stephen Dedalus against the conventions into which he was born. Exuberantly inventive in style, the novel subtly and beautifully orchestrates the patterns of quotation and repetition instrumental in its hero’s quest to create his own character, his own language, life, and art: “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the oldest of ten children in a Catholic family. He attended Jesuit schools and, in 1904, moved first to Trieste, then Paris, with Nora Barnacle; they married in 1931. After publishing his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in 1916, Joyce developed glaucoma, and his eyesight steadily diminished for the rest of his life. His seminal novel Ulysses was published by his friend Sylvia Beach out of her Paris bookstore. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.