Stephen Hero

James Joyce

1963. g. jūn. · New Directions Publishing

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Stephen Hero is an early version of Joyce's A Portrait of the artist as a Young Man. It was originally rejected on grounds of indecency—so the story goes— by twenty publishers, whereupon Joyce threw the manuscript in the fire, but Mrs. Joyce rescued several unburnt portions.

Although Joyce later entirely rewrote his novel of a young Irishman's rebellion against church, country and family, this early version is beautifully composed, the mood being more discursive and personal than in A Portrait. Many episodes later cut for the sake of good novelistic form, especially autobiographical episodes of sensual and family life, are fully presented, with some of the most vivacious dialogue Joyce ever wrote. Between them, the two versions give us a clear example of Joyce's literary development as well as many details of his life.

This edition of Stephen Hero for the first time printed the five missing pages of the novel found among the papers in the Joyce Collection of the Cornell University Library. These pages fill gaps in the text as edited in 1956 by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon and also extend the narrative. The main text of Stephen Hero is a connected, nearly self-contained passage of 383 manuscript pages which turned up soon after Joyce's death. It was first edited by Theodore Spencer and published by New Directions in 1944. In this edition, introductions by the successive editors discuss the literary and bibliographical aspects of this important early work by one of the great modern masters.

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James Joyce was one of innovators of postmodernism. He is widely considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Born in Dublin, James Joyce (1882–1941) was a modernist and proponent of the stream-of-consciousness writing style and is widely considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His works feature primarily Dublin figures such as in the short story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan's Wake (1939).

John J. Slocum, who died in 1997, was one of the world's foremost Joyce scholars.

Herbert T. F. Cahoon was a curator who presided over the collection of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan Library for 35 years.

Theodore Spencer (1902–1949) was an American poet and academic.