A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork - Paperback

by Joseph Campbell (Author), Henry Morton Robinson (Author), Edmund L. Epstein (Editor)

Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake -- James Joyce's masterwork that consumed a third of his life -- have given up after a few pages and dismissed it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first "key" or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of Finnegans Wake. The authors break down Joyce's "unintelligible" book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. A Skeleton Key was Campbell's first book, published five years before he wrote his breakthrough Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Author Biography

Joseph Campbell is widely credited with bringing mythology to a mass audience. His works, including "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," the four volume "The Masks of God," and "The Power of Myth" (with Bill Moyers), rank among the classics in mythology and literature. Henry Morton Robinson was best known for his novel, "The Cardinal."