Stephen Daedalus

Stephen Daedalus was James Joyce's early pen name, and the name of the main character in his early novel Stephen Hero. He appears in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses as Stephen Dedalus. His first name comes from the first Christian martyr, and in a curious juxtaposition, his surname is a reference to the mythological figure, Daedalus, who constructed a pair of wax wings for him and his son, Icarus, as a means of escape from Crete, where he was imprisoned by King Minos (the man who contracted him to build the Labyrinth to house the Minotaur.