A Skeleton Key To Finnegan's Wake

New York: Harcourt Brace and Co, 1944. First American Edition. Octavo. 21cm. Publisher's bottle green cloth titled in yellow to spine. Dustjacket. [xiii]; 365pp. Light bumping to spine ends, very clean and handsome cloth; internally clean with some tape residue to the endpapers from an old dustjacket protector, ownership stamp of Rev. William Gormley to front pastedown; in a bright, lightly sunned copy of the pale dustjacket with some light wear to extremities. A very good copy indeed.

Campbell's first published book, a critical analysis of Joyce's famously convoluted Finnegan's Wake, a work which informed and inspired a lot of Campbell's (truncated) later works, with his most famous concept of the Hero's Journey being one that he developed almost entirely out of his study of Joyce. Campbell and Morton embarked upon their reading of Finnegan's Wake primarily in defence of what they saw as shameless appropriation of Joyce's themes by Thornton Wilder in his play "The Skin of Our Teeth. (Inventory #: 85363)