A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, James - 1916

New York: Huebsch, 1916 First edition, first printing. Original publisher's blue cloth, blind-stamped front cover and gilt spine. A tight and clean copy with some rubbing to edges and spine ends, and some toning to spine. Internally fine and free of any marks, writing or bookplates. A very good copy of the author's first novel. Housed in a custom folding case. Slocum & Cahoon A11. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's first novel and is virtually a complete rewrite of his abandoned novel, Stephen Hero. 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. It was first published in book form in 1916; this copy precedes the first English edition by two months. Partially due to readers' critical reactions, many British publishers initially rejected Portrait, so it was first published in the United States. The plot tells of Stephen Daedalus, whose name alludes to both the Christian martyr Saint Stephen and the Greek mythological inventor Daedalus. It is a Künstlerroman, a subset of the bildungsroman genre, specific to the development of young artists. The novel is written in third-person with the spirit of first-person 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.. Hardcover. Very Good.