A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by JOYCE, JAMES - 1916

New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1916. First Edition; preceding the English edition, issued from the American sheets, by two months. A very nearly fine copy in the rare dust jacket, which has minor wear but numerous spots; overall very good; in a half-leather clamshell box. English printers, loathe to accept liability in risking legal action on moral grounds, refused to print the book. The exact number of copies bound is not known, but evidence strongly suggests that fewer than a thousand copies were produced. Slocum and Cahoon (A Bibliography of James Joyce, Yale, 1953) point out that the original printing plates were used in subsequent printings by Huebsch and the Modern Library, and that, by 1953 there were nearly 100,000 copies in print. By anyone’s estimation, A Portrait of the Artist is among Joyce’s most important works, and therefore, by definition, a highly significant book in modern literature. Connolly 100 (The Modern Movement) “...the Portrait can be read as either an autobiography or a novel. A landmark in sensibility, the prose moves forward in complexity from the child’s sensations at the beginning to the adolescent subtleties at the end...” Huebsch later merged his house with Viking, where he worked for several decades. He was one of the 20th century’s great publishers, in the company of such courageous and tasteful worthies as Cerf, Knopf, Simon, the sad failure that was Liveright, and others. Generally with a leftist bent, Huebsch also famously published Joyce’s Dubliners, Chamber Music, and Exiles, as well as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.