A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) by mythologist Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell

Joseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...

 and Henry Morton Robinson

Henry Morton Robinson

Henry Morton Robinson was an American novelist, best known for A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake written with Joseph Campbell and his 1950 novel The Cardinal, which Time magazine reported was "The year's most popular book, fiction or nonfiction."-Biography:Robinson was born in Boston and graduated...

 is a work of literary criticism. One of the first major texts to provide an in-depth analysis of Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...

(James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

's final novel), A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is considered by many scholars to be a seminal work on the text. The term monomyth

Monomyth

Joseph Campbell's term monomyth, also referred to as the hero's journey, is a basic pattern that its proponents argue is found in many narratives from around the world. This widely distributed pattern was described by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces...

, which Campbell used to describe his journey of the hero in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a non-fiction book, and seminal work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell...

, came from Finnegans Wake.

Campbell and Robinson originally began their unlocking of Joyce's masterwork for two reasons: because Finnegans Wake, while widely recognized as a masterpiece, was also widely dismissed as unintelligible--"the greatest book that nobody's ever read"; and because they had recognized in The Skin of Our Teeth

The Skin of Our Teeth

The Skin of Our Teeth is a play by Thornton Wilder which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It opened on October 15, 1942 at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, before moving to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway on November 18, 1942...

, the popular play by Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder

Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.-Early years:Wilder was born in Madison,...

, an appropriation from Joyce's novel not only of themes but of plot and language.

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake was originally published by Harcourt Brace in 1944.