A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Dublin childhood, a Jesuit education, a sermon on hell that runs for pages, and a young man who decides that neither family, nor country, nor church will have him. Joyce spent ten years on it, burned an early draft, and published it only after Ezra Pound intervened; it ends with Stephen Dedalus leaving for the continent, as Joyce himself had done at twenty-two. Fifty-seven plates of portraiture from 1746 to 1913, among them works by George Reid and Stanhope Forbes, trace the faces and self-scrutiny that accompany a young man's slow formation.