James Augustine Aloysius Joyce is a marvelous Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. He became well known in the literature world by means of his wonderful short stories Dubliners (1914), the novels "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916), "Finnegans Wake" (1939). In this list can be added books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of the writer. In the novel, the author traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical formation of his character, which casts doubt on the unconditional truth of Catholic tenets and apparatus of contemporary Irish society.