"TO FORGE IN THE SMITHY OF MY SOUL THE UNCREATED CONSCIENCE OF MY RACE": BEAUTIFUL FIRST EDITION OF JOYCE'S PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

JOYCE, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1916. Octavo, original blue cloth. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $14,000.

First edition of Joyce's classic stream-of-consciousness work, published in New York against numerous attempts to remove "offending passages"—a defining moment in the history of free expression and the emergence of the modern novel. A lovely copy.

New York publisher B.W. Huebsch was the only publisher "venturesome enough in 1916 to publish Joyce's [novel] unexpurgated… In England, 12 publishers had refused to set [it] up the way Joyce wrote it, and Harriet Weaver, who had published parts of the work serially in her avant-garde magazine The Egoist, would not go along with Ezra Pound's proposal that blank spaces be left and, after printing, the offending passages be filled in with a typewriter. The difficulty was exacerbated because, as everyone knew, only a year earlier, in England, the entire edition of D.H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow had been destroyed by the police. Publishers and printers on both sides of the Atlantic were intimidated" (de Grazia, 18). The novel was not published in England until 1917. "The Portrait can be read either as an autobiography or a novel. A landmark in sensibility, the prose moves forward in complexity from the child's sensations at the beginning to the adolescent subtleties at the end" (Connolly, The Modern Movement 26). Without extraordinarily rare dust jacket. Slocum & Cahoon A11.

Interior fine. Only very minor rubbing to spine ends. An about-fine copy of this classic. Scarce.