Stephen Hero. A Part of the First Draft of a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited from the Manuscript in the Harvard College Library by Theodore Spencer. New York: A New Directions Book, 1944. First American Edition. Pp, 234. Black cloth boards, title in gilt on spine, in publisher’s dust jacket. Jacket chipped with a little loss along edges, otherwise a good copy.

Frontispiece portrait of Joyce by Augustus John, with several plates in the text.

Stephen Hero, Joyce’s early, unfinished precursor to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—offers a raw and revealing glimpse into the author’s evolving literary vision. Completed in about 1906, the novel captures the young Joyce in the act of self-invention, blending autobiographical elements with bold stylistic experimentation. Through its unpolished yet fiercely intellectual prose, Stephen Hero traces the embryonic stages of themes that would later define Joyce’s masterworks; illuminating the creative struggles that shaped one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary writers.