A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN - THE B.W. HUEBSCH FAMILY COPY

New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1916. First Edition. Joyce's autobiographical first novel, first serialized in 25 installments in The Egoist between February 2, 1914 and September 1, 1915 by his great patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver. As for the book publication, she was unsuccessful at finding an English printer willing to assume the responsibility of setting the text - seven of them refused to do it, all on moral grounds. "Under English law, unlike American, the printing of immoral writings is as actionable as their publication" (Slocum & Cahoon, p.20). Weaver sent a copy of her Egoist serialization to New York bookseller Edmond Byrne Hackett, who in turn contacted B.W. Huebsch, who undertook the publication of Portrait, just as he had for Dubliners several weeks earlier. "...on 16 June (an emblematic date for Joyce) Benjamin Huebsch wrote to Miss Weaver with his proposal: publication of the complete novel, with sheets printed in the US going to the English publisher under joint imprints, the costs being shared...He was anxious, he said, to see Joyce properly launched in America, and Pound recommended that Huebsch's offer be accepted" (Bowker, Gordon. James Joyce: A New Biography, p.226).

Through his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce "describes his spiritual journey through his Jesuit education and petty bourgeois Dublin to forge through 'silence, exile and cunning' the 'uncreated conscience of his race'...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 26). The number of copies of the first printing is unknown, but a second was published in April, 1917, followed by three additional printings (1918-1922) before Huebsch merged his publishing house with the Viking Press. We know of no documented presentation copies of the American edition of Portrait; the present copy, likely one of a very few copies with distinguished provenance not already in institutional hands, was one of Benjamin Huebsch's own retained copies, left to his son, Ian Oscar Huebsch, then passed by inheritance to a family friend. Slocum & Cahoon 11. First Printing, preceding the British edition by roughly two months. Octavo (19.25cm); blue cloth, with titles stamped in gilt on spine and in blind to front cover; dustjacket; [iv],299,[1]pp. Spine ends gently nudged, hint of sunning to spine, rear hinge starting (but sound), with some faint, shallow staining to upper board edges; text is fresh, with the gilt titling bright and unrubbed; Very Good. In the original dustjacket, priced $1.50 net at mid-spine, with a brief holograph note in blue grease pencil at lower front panel, either in Huebsch's hand or someone at his office: "1st Ed - addtl. copy." Sunning to spine and panels, old dampstain affecting spine and upper edge of front panel, with shallow losses along the edges - the deepest of these affecting the "SCH" in the publisher's name at base of spine; several splits, tears, and attendant creases, a dozen of them skillfully (and nearly invisibly) mended on verso; Good to Very Good.