Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Silence, exile and cunning." - these are the weapons that Stephen Dedalus chooses in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And these too were weapons that the its author, James Joyce, used against a hostile world he was twenty-two years old, he left his family, the Roman Catholic Church and the "dull torpor" of Dublin to become a writer. With brief exceptions, he would remain away from Ireland for the rest of his life. It was a courageous move for several reasons his need to free himself from the constraints on his development as a writer, Joyce had always been close to his family. He still admired the intellectual and artistic aspects of the Roman Catholic tradition that had nurtured him. And the city of Dublin was in his soul. (When asked later how long he had been away from Dublin, he replied: "Did I ever leave it?") But Joyce achieved his goals. literary goal in exile. The artistic climate of continental Europe encouraged experimentation. With cunning (skill) and hard work, Joyce developed his own literary voice. He worked for ten years on Portrait of the Artist, the fictionalized account of his youth. When it appeared in book form in 1916, twelve years after Joyce's escape from Ireland, it created a sensation. Joyce was acclaimed as a major new force in literature. Portrait of the Artist is usually read as an autobiography, and many of the incidents in it come from Joyce's youth. But don't assume he was exactly like his sober hero, Stephen Dedalus. Joyce's younger brother Stanislaus, to whom he was very close, called Portrait of the Artist "a lying autobiography and an angry satire". The book should be read as a work of art, not as a documentary document. Joyce transformed autobiography into fiction by selecting, sifting, and reconstructing scenes from his own life to create a portrait of Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and serious boy who gradually defines himself as an artist. However, Joyce and Stephen have a lot in common. Both were indelibly marked by their upbringings in grey, proud, Catholic Dublin, a city that harbored dreams of being the capital of an independent nation but was in reality a backwater ruled by England..