Publisher Description
Countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake — James Joyce’s 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 Joyce’s 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.
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“The key that will open [Finnegans Wake’s] treasures.”
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New York Times
About the Authors
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was a prolific writer, dedicated editor, beloved teacher, inspiring lecturer, gifted storyteller, avid scholar, and a foremost interpreter of myth. Among the many books he wrote and edited, he is best known for The Hero with a Thousand Faces, his four-volume The Masks of God, and his magnum opus, Historical Atlas of World Mythology. In 1988, a series of television interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, introduced his views to millions of people.
About Arthur Morey
Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.