Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a masterpiece of early modernism. Written by James Joyce, serialized in Pound’s The Egoist, and published in 1916, it is Joyce’s first novel, a mixture of memoir, religio-philosophy, commentary, and aesthetics. Given the fact that Joyce might have been the greatest writer of the 20th Century, his formation as a person who rejected his Church and most Irish conventions, is a topic of intense interest by readers and critics throughout the world. In great measure, A Portrait answers the question: How did James Joyce become James Joyce? How did a hard drinking roustabout with a delicate constitution, prone to extreme behavior, become a demi-god among writers and the master with whom all readers must make some acquaintance. Endowed from birth with verbal gifts that amazed all and being utterly convinced of his genius and its concomitant duty to work himself dry, Joyce subordinated all, except, perhaps, his love for his wife and children, to the task of art. The world is fortunate to have this novel, because A Portrait almost failed to see the light of day. In his despair over being ignored and discounted by other writers, critics and publishers, Joyce, after a night of heavy drinking, tossed the manuscript into a fire. The script burned until his wife, Nora, rescued the pages. A grateful Joyce, who had a phenomenal memory and knew most of his work by heart, admitted that there were sections of A Portrait so subtle, so finely crafted that he would never have been able to reconstruct them had they been destroyed. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

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