A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN - THE B.W. HUEBSCH FAMILY COPY

by Joyce, James

$32,500 · Offered by Biblio

First edition

New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1916. First Edition. Joyce's autobiographical first novel, first serialized in 25 installments in The Egoist between February 2, 1914 and September 1, 1915 by his great patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver. As for the book publication, she was unsuccessful at finding an English printer willing to assume the responsibility of setting the text – seven of them refused to do it, all on moral grounds. "Under English law, unlike American, the printing of immoral writings is as actionable as their publication" (Slocum & Cahoon, p.20). Weaver sent a copy of her Egoist serialization to New York bookseller Edmond Byrne Hackett, who in turn contacted B.W. Huebsch, who undertook the publication of Portrait, just as he had for Dubliners several weeks earlier. "...on 16 June (an emblematic date for Joyce) Benjamin Huebsch wrote to Miss Weaver with his proposal: publication of the complete novel, with sheets printed in the US going to the English publisher under joint imprints, the costs being shared...He was anxious, he said, to see Joyce properly launched in America, and Pound recommended that Huebsch's offer be accepted" (Bowker, Gordon. James Joyce: A New Biography, p.226). Through his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce "describes his spiritual journey through his Jesuit education and petty bourgeois Dublin to forge through 'silence, exile and cunning' the 'uncreated conscience of his race'...A landmark in sensibility, the prose moves forward in complexity from the child's

• Publisher: B.W. Huebsch
• Year: 1916
• Edition: First Edition
• Printing: first
• Binding: unknown

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