A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a 1916 novel and cornerstone of literary modernism by Irish author James Joyce. The story follows Stephen Dedalus, Joyce"s fictional alter-ego, and charts his path to personal and artistic maturity through his stream of consciousness. This is a non-linear narrative style typical of modernist prose in which a character"s thoughts, feelings, and reactions are portrayed in a continuous flow and often disrupt the linear narrative of events and dialogue in the story.