A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen
“This meticulously edited volume is both delightful and entertaining.”
“Quite apart from many minute insights into possible meanings of the Wake, this collection brings out the exuberance of those amateur pioneering raids into a mysterious, challenging, unfathomed book before there was yet a Joyce industry.”
The letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen, written between 1950 and 1975, reveal the probing energy and encyclopedic knowledge they each brought to their study of James Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake. Adaline Glasheen is well known to Joyce scholars as the author of the Census, the indispensable companion to any study of the Wake. Thornton Wilder is described by Edmund Wilson, the author of seminal essays on the Wake as having ‘explored the book more thoroughly than anyone else I have heard of.’ In their letters, the two unknot Joycean wordplay, identify allusions, grouse and gossip.
Edited by Edward M. Burns and Joshua A. Gaylord with previously unpublished essays and notes by Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen.