Cover of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

3.4 · 42 ratings on Open Library

The autobiographical story of Joyce’s youth in Ireland and his escaping the country’s conformity and mediocrity to blossom as a writer on the continent.

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Length
85,000 words
Reading time
About 5 hours
Format
EPUB, DRM-free

About the book

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s first novel, published after the previous success of his short story collection Dubliners. The novel is written in a modernist style, with dialog and narration blending together in a kind of stream-of-consciousness meant to invoke the blurriness of memory.

Joyce originally planned writing a realist autobiographical novel of 63 chapters titled Stephen Hero. He abandoned the attempt halfway through, and refocused his efforts on Portrait, a shorter, sharper work in the modernist style. His alter-ego remained Stephen Dedalus, named after Daedalus, the mythological Greek craftsman and father of Icarus. Portrait was written while he was waiting for Dubliners to be published, a process that took eight years and so frustrated Joyce that he once threw the manuscript of Portrait into a fire, causing his family to run to save it.

This is the Standard Ebooks edition, carefully proofread and typeset, with a table of contents and linked footnotes.

What readers think

3.4 out of 5

42 ratings of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from Open Library readers, as of 10th Nov.

  • 5 stars26%
  • 4 stars21%
  • 3 stars26%
  • 2 stars17%
  • 1 star10%