A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Stephen Dedalus grows up in Catholic Ireland, learns what authority sounds like, and decides that his own language is the only thing he owes any loyalty to. The novel follows him from childhood sentences to the diary entries of a young man leaving, and the prose grows up with him.
This is the book where Joyce first used the technique that later became famous: the narration takes on the vocabulary and rhythm of whatever Stephen currently believes. It is therefore funny and painful in turns, and the sermons in the middle are meant to be as tedious as they were in life.
Public-domain status
First published in 1916. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; James Joyce died in 1941, so this work has been free to republish there since 2012.
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