James Joyce began his career by writing a series of stories etching (鲜明地描述) with extraordinary clarity, describing aspects of Dublin life. But these stories—published as Dubliners in 1914—are more than sharp realistic sketches. In each, the detail is so chosen and organized that carefully interacting symbolic meanings are set up, and as a result Dubliners is a book about man’s fate as well as a series of sketches of Dublin. A part of Joyce’s first draft was posthumously published under the original title of Stephen Hero: a comparison between it and the final version which Joyce gave to the world. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows how carefully Joyce reworked and compressed his material for maximum effect. It is not literally true as autobiography, though it has many autobiographical elements; but it is representatively true not only for Joyce but of the relation between the artist and society in modern world.