A SKELETON KEY TO FINNEGAN’S WAKE , A Seminal Decoding of Joyce’s Final Masterpiece
P.R. Contact Kim Corbin

“Joyce has found in Mr. Campbell and Mr. Robinson the ideal readers who approach his book with piety, passion, and intelligence.”
— The New York Times

Since its original publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake — James Joyce’s masterwork, which consumed a third of his life — have given up after a few pages and dismissed James Joyce’s great work as a “perverse triumph of the unintelligible.”

Five years later, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with novelist and poet Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first “key” or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of Finnegans Wake. The authors break down Joyce’s “unintelligible” book, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary.

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.

About the Author
Perhaps most responsible for bringing mythology to a mass audience, Joseph Campbell’s works rank among the classics in mythology and literature: Hero with a Thousand Faces, the four-volume The Masks of God, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, and many others. Among his many awards, Campbell received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Contribution to Creative Literature and the 1985 Medal of Honor for Literature from the National Arts Club. A past president of the American Society for the Study of Religion, Campbell was professor emeritus at Sarah Lawrence College in New York until his death in 1987.

A SKELETON KEY TO FINNEGANS WAKE
Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterwork
By: Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson
Foreword by Edmund Epstein
Publication Date: April 28, 2005
Price: $23.95
Hardcover, 400 pp, 5.5 x 8.5”
ISBN: 1-57731-405-0

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