A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road: that is how the novel opens, and the prose is exactly as young as the boy thinking it. Then it grows up. Chapter by chapter, the language of _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ ages alongside Stephen Dedalus, from a child's babble through a schoolboy's terror, through the retreat sermon on hell that scorches him into frightened piety, and out into the long, ringing periods of a mind learning to think in paragraphs. The book asks what a soul owes the country, the church, the family that made it, and answers by walking away from all three. On a strand at dusk Stephen watches a girl wading, and beauty arrives in him like a vocation no altar could hold. By the end he is writing in his own voice at last, vowing to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, and you realise the novel has been that smithy all along.