A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman.

American modernist poet Ezra Pound had the novel serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch of New York.

The publication of A Portrait and the short story collection Dubliners (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism.

[1] After a stretch of failed attempts to get published and launch his own newspaper, Joyce then took jobs teaching, singing and reviewing books.

[1] Nora and Joyce eloped to continental Europe, first staying in Zürich before settling for ten years in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary), where he taught English.

There Nora gave birth to their children, Giorgio in 1905 and Lucia in 1907, and Joyce wrote fiction, signing some of his early essays and stories "Stephen Daedalus".

At the request of its editors, Joyce submitted a work of philosophical fiction entitled "A Portrait of the Artist"[3] to the Irish literary magazine Dana on 7 January 1904.

"[5] On his 22nd birthday, 2 February 1904, Joyce began a realist autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, which incorporated aspects of the aesthetic philosophy expounded in A Portrait.

[9] Joyce recycled the two earlier attempts at explaining his aesthetics and youth, "A Portrait of the Artist" and Stephen Hero, as well as his notebooks from Trieste concerning the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas; they all came together in five carefully paced chapters.

The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.The childhood of Stephen Dedalus is recounted using vocabulary that changes as he grows, in a voice not his own but sensitive to his feelings.

[19] Stephen attends the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, where the apprehensive, intellectually gifted boy suffers the ridicule of his classmates while he learns the schoolboy codes of behaviour.

[22] Stephen squanders a large cash prize from school, and begins to see prostitutes, as distance grows between him and his drunken father.

He feels that the words of the sermon, describing horrific eternal punishment in hell, are directed at himself and, overwhelmed, comes to desire forgiveness.

[26] As a student at University College, Dublin, Stephen grows increasingly wary of the institutions around him: Church, school, politics and family.

[27] An increasingly dry, humourless Stephen explains his alienation from the Church and the aesthetic theory he has developed to his friends, who find that they cannot accept either of them.

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.The novel is a Bildungsroman and captures the essence of character growth and understanding of the world around him.

[32] Joyce fully employs the free indirect style to demonstrate Stephen's intellectual development from his childhood, through his education, to his increasing independence and ultimate exile from Ireland as a young man.

[34] The writing style is notable also for Joyce's omission of quotation marks: he indicates dialogue by beginning a paragraph with a dash, as is commonly used in French, Spanish or Russian publications.

[43] The Canadian scholar Hugh Kenner saw the three forms of literary art as a progression that applies to his novels, with A Portrait being lyric, Ulysses epic, and Finnegans Wake dramatic.

[45] As a narrative which depicts a character throughout his formative years, M. Angeles Conde-Parrilla posits that identity is possibly the most prevalent theme in the novel.

When Stephen stoutly refuses to serve his Easter duty later in the novel, his tone mirrors characters like Faust and Lucifer in its rebelliousness.

[52] In Catholicism, "Eucharist" refers both to the act of Consecration, or transubstantiation, and its product, the body and blood of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine.

[55] The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has parallels in the structure of the novel, and gives Stephen his surname, as well as the epigraph containing a quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

According to Ivan Canadas, the epigraph may parallel the heights and depths that end and begin each chapter, and can be seen to proclaim the interpretive freedom of the text.

[63] A Portrait won Joyce a reputation for his literary skills, as well as a patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, the business manager of The Egoist.

He concluded that the "author shows us he has art, strength and originality", but needed "to shape [his novel] more carefully as the product of the craftsmanship, mind and imagination of an artist".

"[67] The following year Pound wrote, "[Joyce] has his scope beyond that of the novelists his contemporaries, in just so far as whole stretches of his keyboard are utterly outside of their compass."

He continued, "[In] A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man there is no omission; there is nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it without profanation—without, above all, the profanations of sentiment and sentimentality—and there is nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with metallic exactitude.

"[71] Kenner, writing in 1948, was critical of Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of A Portrait, arguing that he "does not become an artist at all... but an aesthete" and "to take him seriously is very hard indeed".

[77] As of 2017 computer scientists and literature scholars at University College Dublin, Ireland are in a collaboration to create the multimedia version of this work, by charting the social networks of characters in the novel.