A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man originated as a drastic revision of an earlier, abandoned autobiographical draft titled Stephen Hero (begun around 1907, with surviving fragments published posthumously in 1944). Joyce worked on his early fiction while teaching English at the Berlitz School in Pola (now Pula, Croatia) and Trieste, Italy. Poet Ezra Pound championed Joyce's work beginning in 1914, using his influence as unofficial editor of The Egoist in London to serialize the novel in 1914–1915. Unable to find a British printer willing to typeset the book due to fear of censorship, Harriet Shaw Weaver arranged for B.W. Huebsch to print the sheets in the United States on December 29, 1916, ahead of the English Egoist Press edition. The novel is structured into five chapters, each written in a third-person voice whose syntax, vocabulary, and emotional register evolve to mirror protagonist Stephen Dedalus's age and intellectual maturity. It opens with simple, sensory childhood language ("Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road...") and culminates in dense, Latin-inflected stream-of-consciousness diary entries as Stephen resolves to leave Dublin for Paris.