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.
Price: $21.95
Pages: 432
Publisher: New World Library
Imprint: New World Library
Publication Date:
05 March 2013
Trim Size: 8.50 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9781608681662
Format: Paperback
“Campbell and Robinson deserve a citation from the Republic of Letters for having succeeded in bringing out their Skeleton Key at this time. . . . The chance to be among the first to explore the wonders of Finnegans Wake is one of the few great intellectual and aesthetic treats that these last bad years have yielded.”
— Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker
“Joyce has found in Mr. Campbell and Mr. Robinson the ideal readers who approach his book with piety, passion, and intelligence, and who have devoted several years to fashioning the key that will open its treasures.”
— Max Lerner, The New York Times
“A fascinating book, which does precisely what it sets out to do — ‘not to elaborate any passage or group of images, but merely to indicate the fundamental narrative itself.’ This has been done, I think, to admiration. . . . The Skeleton Key really unlocks the door.”
— Vincent Starret, Chicago Tribune
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.
