A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

Though it had its early champions when published in 1939, Finnegans Wake, Joyces final novel, was (and is) more often met with puzzlement and even exasperation. Not so with Joseph Campbell, whod been immersing himself in the mythical and literary allusions Joyce used. In 1944, when Campbell was a young professor, he and poet and novelist Henry Morton Robinson, produced this, the first “key” to Finnegans rich world. Campbell and Robinson outline the books action and clarify its images and references. And though many guides to Joyces epic have subsequently been written, theirs brims with a passion to override detractors and give Joyce his due. Authorized by the Joseph Campbell Foundation, this guide beautifully affirms Joyces “resilient, all-enjoying, all-animating ‘Yes.”

Countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake — James Joyces 1939 masterwork, on which he labored for a third of his life — have given up after a few pages and “dismissed the book as a perverse triumph of the unintelligible.” In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with novelist and poet Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first guide to understanding the fascinating world of Finnegans Wake. Page by page, chapter by chapter, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake outlines the basic action of Joyces book, simplifies and clarifies the complex web of images and allusions, and provides an understandable, continuous narrative from which the reader can venture out on his or her own. This edition includes a foreword and updates by Joyce scholar Dr. Edmund L. Epstein that add the context of sixty subsequent years of scholarship.

Joseph Campbell, whose classic works include The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God, died in 1987. Henry Morton Robinson, best known for his novel, The Cardinal, died in 1961. Edmund L. Epstein lives in New York City.