A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce is known for many things — a dazzling, reinventionist approach to language; rich, sumptuous, fascinating prose; and comprehensive mastery of the Modernist style to name just a few. Accessibility is something less commonly associated with Joyce. His masterwork, Ulysses, continues to throw up multitudinous, and often conflicting, interpretations. His final novel, Finnegans Wake, has confounded hardened literary veterans for generations with its refusal to adhere to any sort of prose convention.

But not all of Joyce's writing is like this. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represents the perfect entry point into a rewarding body of work. Joyce's Künstlerroman — his story of artistic awakening and coming of age — is presented in a far more traditional, direct manner than some of his other works. And yet it still provides the reader with those artistic flourishes and leaps of language and style that are so unmistakably Joyce. With this work, Joyce sought to expand the boundaries of what literature could do, peeling back the shallow and the superficial in search of what lies beneath. In an artistic sense, as well as a philosophical one, the work is a resounding success.