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.....
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