A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake

Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork

By: Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, Edmund L. Epstein - editor

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Countless would-be readers and listeners 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 listener 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.

©1944, 1961 1944, 1961 by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, © 2005 by the Joseph Campbell Foundation. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Essential reading

Finnigan’s Wake was probably the most confusing book I’ve ever attempted to read. Joseph Campbell’s interpretations & illuminations make me want to give it another try