James Joyce's (books by this author) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published on this date in 1916. It tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego, as he grows up and eventually rejects his religion and his culture.
Early in the book, Dedalus is a young schoolboy, and by the novel's end, Stephen Dedalus has grown up, and grown cynical, and is about to leave his Dublin home for Paris. He tells a friend: "I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning."
Finally, Dedalus writes in his journal: "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
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