A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of the Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. It follows Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to his departure from Ireland.

The book opens with the sensations of a very small boy: a song, a wet bed, a dance his father performs. It then follows Stephen through a Jesuit school, through his family's slide into debt and shabbiness, and through a period of intense religious devotion that collapses into something closer to disgust. At university he becomes a student of language and of his own ambitions, arguing with his friends about Irish nationalism, the Catholic Church and the English language, and slowly concluding that the only way to write what he wants is to go. Joyce wrote the novel in a style that changes as Stephen ages, from a child's sentences to the formal, self-conscious prose of a young man who has decided to be an artist. The surname Dedalus points at the Greek craftsman who built the labyrinth, and the Dublin of the book is a maze Stephen has to escape.

An earlier version, written in a plainer style, was abandoned after twenty-five chapters, and the published novel keeps its attention almost entirely inside one forming mind.