'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins with one of the most arresting opening sentences in literature' Patrick McGuinness, from his Preface.A Portrait first appeared in instalments in the modernist magazine The Egoist in 1914, before it came out as a book in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. An autobiographical 'coming of age' story, A Portrait is Joyce's first novel. Many elements of Joyce's own life - his Catholic schooling, his family circumstances and his father's financial difficulties, as well as his sexual, political and artistic awakenings - are fictionalized and in it he skilfully extend the English language, as it opens with a child's voice rendered by a third-person narrator, and closes with the mature Stephen's first-person reflections.