Joyce wrote the first draft of a work he called Stephen Hero between 1901 and 1906, but was dissatisfied and later wrote and developed it. He partially destroyed this version in a fit of rage when it was turned down by a publisher, and again rewrote the work in the form in which it was finally published in 1916 as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Editorial Reviews
"By far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing. The technique is startling....A most memorable novel." --H.G. Wells
"So profound and beautiful and convincing a book is part of the lasting literature of our age....In it is the promise of that new literature, new both in form and content, that will be the classics of tomorrow." --Herbert Gorman
"[Mr. Joyce is] concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its myriad message through the brain, he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, though it be probability or coherence or any other of the handrails to which we cling for support when we set our imaginations free.” --Virginia Woolf
"[A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will] remain a permanent part of English literature." --Ezra Pound
About the Author
James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. After receiving a rigorous Jesuit education, twenty-year-old Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin in 1902 to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. His writings include Chamber Music (1907), Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Exiles (1918), Ulysses (1922), Pomes Penyeach (1927), Finnegan's Wake (1939), and an early draft of A Portrait of a Young Man, Stephan Hero (1944). Ulysses required seven years to complete, and his masterpiece, Finnegan's Wake, took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.
