Stephen Hero
by James Joyce 
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Description
This early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which Stephen Daedalus rebels against church, country and family, is taken from an incomplete manuscript and is supported by literary and bibliographical notes.Tags
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Member Reviews
While the book is definitely not part of Joyce's "untouchable four" prose fiction masterpieces it is undoubtedly a lot of fun in its own right. Instead of the soaring descriptive passages found in Dubliners and A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man you get vast swaths of dialogue batted back and forth between Stephen and various other cohorts. This suits Joyce just fine since dialogue is one of his many gifts. Sadly the book in this publication remains incomplete so I took off a half star. It does thicken Stephen's character and explains decisions Joyce made in his personal life (if you read the excellent Ellmann biography) that otherwise could remain a mystery. This is definitely not a starting point to enter the works of Joyce, but show more it is notably superior to Chamber Music, Exiles, and Pomes Penyeach. All of the mentioned works in this review are well worth the read, however, even if some of it is for fans. show less
The rough original draft to "Portrait of the artist" and in my view much, much better.
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Best of Irish Literature
37 works; 7 members
Best manuscripts lost on public transport (or elsewhere...)
7 works; 3 members
Fiction with Men's Given Names in the Title
302 works; 10 members
Books You Read For University
184 works; 3 members
Author Information
498+ Works 92,872 Members
James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, into a large Catholic family. Joyce was a very good pupil, studying poetics, languages, and philosophy at Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, and the Royal University in Dublin. Joyce taught school in Dalkey, Ireland, before marrying in 1904. Joyce lived in Zurich and Triest, show more teaching languages at Berlitz schools, and then settled in Paris in 1920 where he figured prominently in the Parisian literary scene, as witnessed by Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Joyce's collection of fine short stories, Dubliners, was published in 1914, to critical acclaim. Joyce's major works include A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Stephen Hero. Ulysses, published in 1922, is considered one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century. The book simply chronicles one day in the fictional life of Leopold Bloom, but it introduces stream of consciousness as a literary method and broaches many subjects controversial to its day. As avant-garde as Ulysses was, Finnegans Wake is even more challenging to the reader as an important modernist work. Joyce died just two years after its publication, in 1941. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
James Joyce has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Notable Lists
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Jonathan Cape Paperback (JCP75)
Gallimard, Folio (670)
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Is abridged in
Common Knowledge
- Original title
- Stephen Hero
- Original publication date
- 1944
- People/Characters
- Stephen Daedelus
- First words
- ... anyone spoke to him mingled a too polite disbelief with its expectancy.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 759
- Popularity
- 36,801
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.81)
- Languages
- 9 — Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 28
- ASINs
- 20
