Noon is an American educator and literary scholar who has written frequently on Joyce's work. He is the author of Joyce and Aquinas. In the following excerpt, he offers a general study of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, focusing upon it as a novel of personal rebellion.

James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was first published forty-seven years ago, not in Ireland but in New York, 1916. This was a year in the First World War; in Dublin the year of the Easter Week rebellion. Joyce, then at Zurich in neutral Switzerland, was thirty-three, fifteen years younger than [Samuel] Butler had been when he gave up his rewriting of The Way of All Flesh. The haze was not so dense for Joyce, and he had not so far to look backward. The Portrait is also a most carefully rewritten...