A brief history of Joyce’s first novel
James Joyce’s celebrated semi-autobiographical work A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was originally conceived in 1903 as a 63-chapter novel then titled Stephen Hero. The novel we have today is a much-revised and condensed version of that original project and was initially published in serial format in the London literary magazine The Egoist, between February 1914 and September 1915, at the urging of American avant-garde poet Ezra Pound.
The novel first appeared in print as a single volume on December 29th of the following year, 1916. Having had difficulty finding a publisher in Europe, it was first brought out by the New York publisher B. W. Huebsch, a champion of modernist fiction.
The Digital Multimedia Edition
Our edition is a facsimile of the text of a 1921 reprint of the 1916 New York edition, which is now in the public domain. The exact physical copy of the book which contributed the text is held in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and was digitised by The Internet Archive.
You can read our edition online, listen to the audiobook recorded by Irish actors Barry McGovern and Sam McGovern, or download the Kindle or plain-text versions of the novel.
The Decade of Centenaries
The Decade of Centenaries is a national cultural programme which commemorates significant events in Irish history that took place between 1912 and 1922. The Digital Multimedia Edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man aims to participate in these commemorations by making Joyce’s 1916 text freely available to the public in multiple formats, and highlighting a moment of major importance in Irish literary history.
For more information about UCD’s participation in this programme, please see the UCD Decade of Centenaries website.