A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

New York: Huebsch, 1916 First edition, first printing. Publisher's blue cloth, blind-stamped front cover and gilt spine. A very good copy, with a slight lean to spine and wear to spine ends, some light spotting to cloth and rubbing to board edge, a slight mark to fore edge of pages 45-48, binding slightly cracked between pages 28 and 29, otherwise sturdy. Internally free of any writing or bookplates. Lacking the scarce original dust jacket. Overall, a solid copy of the author's first novel. Slocum & Cahoon A11. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's second book and first novel. With the assistance of Ezra Pound, the semi-autobiographical text was first published serially in twenty-one monthly installments in the British literary magazine The Egoist from February 1914-September 1915. Readers' critical reactions and fear of obscenity laws led many British publishers to initially reject publication, and it was first published in book form in America in 1916. The book, which is a virtual rewrite of his abandoned novel, Stephen Hero, tells the story of the young artist Stephen Daedalus, Joyce's fictionalized alter ego. The name alludes to both the Christian martyr Saint Stephen and the Greek mythological inventor Daedalus. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a Künstlerroman, a subset of the bildungsroman genre. The novel is written in Joyce's characteristic style of free indirect speech; Joyce's writing style matures along with Daedalus' own consciousness so that the sophistication of the narrator's voice mirrors the protagonist's level of awareness.. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good.