A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen

These unpublished letters between the esteemed teacher and literary critic, Adaline Glasheen, and the great American writer, Thornton Wilder, were written over a twenty-five year period, from 1950 to 1975. They reveal the probing energy and encyclopedic knowledge they each brought to Joyce’s book, back when it was still a most mysterious work. Glasheen is well known as the author of the ground-breaking Census to the Wake, while Wilder was for many years an avid amateur reader and interpreter of the book (for years he traveled with a densely annotated copy of the book), and drew on it for his play, The Skin of Our Teeth. These letters are maps of almost boundless range of references, symbols, and allusions. They will help many others to tour the darkling plain that is Finnegans Wake.