Künstlerroman is a novel that traces the development of an artist from childhood to mastery.
The Künstlerroman — German for 'artist novel' — is a specialised form of the Bildungsroman in which the protagonist's formation culminates not in marriage or social integration but in vocation. The character discovers art is the only life worth having and accepts the loneliness that comes with it. James Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' (1916) is the model; W. Somerset Maugham's 'Of Human Bondage' (1915), Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' (1913–1927), and Doris Lessing's 'The Golden Notebook' (1962) all carry the form. The Künstlerroman tends to be self-portraiture lightly veiled — writers writing about becoming writers — and the genre's recurring tension is between the demands of art and the demands of ordinary life, a conflict its protagonists almost always resolve in art's favour.