Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1939. First American Edition. Pp, 628. Black cloth, titled in gilt to front board and spine, in original dust jacket. A nice bright copy.

The first American edition of Joyce’s monumental and revolutionary work, published in the same year as the first English edition (Faber & Faber). This copy represents the standard trade issue.

A work of extraordinary linguistic invention, Finnegans Wake abandons conventional narrative to construct a dream-like world where language itself is fractured and recombined into a unique polyglot prose. It traces the cycles of history and the story of the Earwicker family through a night of sleep, creating what Joyce called “a history of the world,” filtered through myth, puns, and the subconscious.