A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- 222
- Pages
- about 4 h
- Reading time
- Film 1977
- On screen
- 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction
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Our view
“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is a novel whose long reckoning with religion is its power. It follows Stephen Dedalus from childhood to his break with church and country, in a modernist style some readers call slow and heavy but worth the effort. Others find the early chapters dull, and the religious passages can feel endless even to those they move. Readers who once left a faith may recognise themselves.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the second book and first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen once.
- FilmA Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.2 across 371 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 71% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Classics average of 7.7. That is how 7.3 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 6.7 | 41 | 11% |
| Hardcover | 7.2 | 330 | 89% |
Frequently asked
How long is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?
It has 222 pages — shorter than 71% of the ranked books in Classics.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Classics — with scores between 7.3 and 7.4, closest to this book.
