The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake

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Though it had its early champions when published in 1939, Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s final novel, was (and is) more often met with puzzlement and even exasperation. Not so with Joseph Campbell, who’d 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 book’s action and clarify its images and references. And though many guides to Joyce’s 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 Joyce’s “resilient, all-enjoying, all-animating ‘Yes’.”