Joyce's first published novel was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It first appared in serial form in The Egoist, and then in book form in 1916. The novel is a Künstlerroman (a coming of age of an artist novel) about a semi-authobiographical version of Joyce, named Stephen Dedalus.

When Joyce began writing Ulysses in 1914, he decided to continue the story of Stephen Dedalus, and in 1915 wrote to Ezra Pound in that his new book "is a continuation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man after three years' interval blended with many of the persons of Dubliners" (Ellmann, 383).