Fiction · 1916
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Stephen Dedalus is a small boy at the start, sorting the world into what is nice and what is not; by the end he is a young man who has just decided he will not serve. Everything between those two points — Clongowes Wood College and the pandying he appeals to the rector over, a Jesuit retreat's three-day sermon on hell that frightens him into confession, University College Dublin and the aesthetic theory he works out walking and arguing with a friend — is the education, spiritual and otherwise, that gets him from one to the other. The book ends on his own diary entries, which simply stop.
Joyce had already tried this story once, in a much longer draft called Stephen Hero that he abandoned and partly destroyed; this shorter, five-chapter version was serialized in The Egoist through 1914 and 1915 at Ezra Pound's arrangement, then published complete on 29 December 1916 — in New York, by B. W. Huebsch, before any British publisher would take it. The Egoist Press brought out the London edition the following February.
Bibliomancer restores the 1916 text exactly as Huebsch printed it.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1882–1941 · Modern
James Joyce (1882–1941) was born in Dublin, educated by the Jesuits and at University College Dublin, and left Ireland in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, living thereafter in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) are his principal works; all of them are set in the city he had left. He died in Zurich.
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