A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners In One Volume by James Joyce (Trade Paperback)
This novel was ranked by The Modern Library as the third greatest English language novel of the 20th century. It is semi-autobiographical in form and depicts the formative years in the life of Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce. The name Daedalus is an allusion to a craftsman of Greek mythology.
The story traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions he has been brought up in. He finally leaves for Paris to pursue his calling as an artist. The work pioneers some of Joyce's modernist techniques that would later come to fruition in Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.