A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce’s first novel traces the growth of Stephen Dedalus from a bewildered schoolboy into a young man set on becoming an artist. The prose itself changes as Stephen ages, moving from a child’s scattered fragments into dense, self-searching argument, and it carries him through a strict Jesuit education, a crisis of religious guilt and terror, and a slow break from family, church, and country. By the end he chooses exile and art over the claims of Ireland and Catholicism, vowing to forge in his own soul the uncreated conscience of his race. A landmark of modernist fiction and the seedbed of Ulysses. Free to download as a PDF and EPUB edition.