A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man attracted much attention when it was published, and also caused controversy. The book was widely reviewed in Europe and the United States. The most enthusiastic reactions came from other leading novelists and intellectuals of the period, who acclaimed it as a work of genius. However, not all early critics agreed on the book's merits. Rather than praising its originality, some critics denounced the work as formless or as blasphemous and obscene.

The English novelist H. G. Wells reviewed the book in 1917, the year after its publication. Writing in the New Republic, Wells called it "by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing. It is a mosaic of jagged fragments that … [renders] with extreme completeness the growth of a rather secretive, imaginative boy in Dublin." Wells went on to remark that...