A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in The Egoist from 1914 to 1915 and published in book form in 1916. It depicts the formative years in the life of Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and a pointed allusion to the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology, Daedalus.

A Portrait is a key example of the Künstlerroman (an artists Bildungsroman) in English literature. Joyces novel traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions in which he has been raised. He finally leaves for abroad to pursue his calling as an artist. The work pioneers some of Joyces modernist techniques that would later come to fruition in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The novel, which has had a "huge influence on novelists across the world", was ranked by Modern Library as the third greatest English-language novel of the 20th century.