James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish writer and poet, a representative of modernism, and a recognized classic of world literature, a teacher of the greatest prose writers of the modern Western world: Faulkner, Hemingway, Cortázar, and others.
“Portrait of the Artist in Youth” is a novel of recollection, at the center of which is the long-term spiritual drama of the young poet Stephen Dedalus. Following Stephen’s self-analysis during childhood, adolescence, and youth, you observe the formation of the hero’s inner conflict—abandoning the faith of his fathers, breaking with his relatives, and being ready to curse his homeland: “They tell me, ‘Die for Ireland,’ and I say, ‘Let Ireland die for me.’”