Irish writer James Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published in 1916. It is a Kuenstlerroman written in a modernist style that follows the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego whose surname alludes to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman in Greek mythology. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions that shaped his upbringing, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe.

The work employs techniques that Joyce expanded on in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan's Wake (1939).Joyce began A Portrait in 1904 as Stephen Hero, a 63-chapter autobiographical novel written in a realistic style. In 1907, Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero after 25 chapters and began reworking its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, eschewing strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen's evolving consciousness. Ezra Pound, an American modernist poet, serialized the novel in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and B. W. Huebsch of New York published it as a book in 1916. The publication of A Portrait and the short story collection Dubliners (1914) propelled Joyce to the forefront of literary modernism.