Stephen Hero: Part of the first draft of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.

JOYCE, James. Edited with an Introduction by Theodore Spencer.

Item Number: 115641

London: Jonathan Cape, 1944.

First edition of this Joyce’s unfinished autobiographical novel, taken from his abandoned manuscript and published posthumously. Octavo, original cloth. In very good condition.

In 1904, Joyce attempted to publish "A Portrait of the Artist", an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected by the free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story into a novel he called "Stephen Hero". Intended to be a fictional rendering of his youth, Joyce grew frustrated with its direction and abandoned the work. It was never published in this form, but years later, in Trieste, Joyce completely rewrote it as "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". The unfinished "Stephen Hero" was not published until after his death.