A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Compass Books C9)

253 pp. Miriam Woods cover design. The first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, best known for Ulysses, who also wrote Finnegan's Wake and Dubliners. It traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, and culminates with his self-exile from Ireland in Europe.