Jack Finney - author
Created | Updated Dec 5, 2006
Jack Finney (October 2, 1911 - November 14, 1995) was an American author. His best-known
works are science fiction and thrillers.
Finney was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was given the name John Finney. After his father
died when he was three years old, he was renamed Walter Braden Finney in honour of his father, but
continued to be known as "Jack" throughout his life. He attended Knox College in Galesburg,
Illinois. He married Marguerite Guest and they had two children, Kenneth and Marguerite. After
living in New York City and working for an advertising agency there, he moved with his family to
Marin County, California in the early 1950s. He died in Greenbrae, California.
Finney's novel The Body Snatchers (1955) was the basis for the 1956 movie Invasion of
the Body Snatchers (remade in 1978 and, in 1993, as Body Snatchers). It tells the story of aliens who invade Earth by emerging from pods and
taking over the bodies of humans.
Finney's greatest success came with his science fiction novel Time and Again (1970). Its
protagonist, Simon Morley, is working in advertising in New York City when he is recruited for a
secret government project trying to achieve time travel. Instead of using a physical machine, the
participants steep themselves in the history and culture of a particular time and place, then travel
there through hypnosis or self-hypnosis. Morley travels to the New York City of 1882. The novel is
notable for Finney's vivid and detailed picture of life in the city at that time. Morley sees many
actual historical sites, some now gone (e.g., the post office that, until 1939, stood in what is now the
southern tip of City Hall Park) and some still existing (e.g., St. Patrick's Cathedral, then the tallest
building in its Fifth Avenue neighbourhood).
Finney died of pneumonia and emphysema at the age of 84, not long after finishing From Time
to Time, the sequel to Time and Again.
Some photos of important sites in Time and Again as they appeared in late 2003 can be
found at Tech Tidbit.
Works
Five Against the House (1954)The Body Snatchers (1955)
The Third Level (1957)
Assault on a Queen (1959)
Good Neighbor Sam (1963)
I Love Galesburg in the Springtime (1963)
The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1968)
Time and Again (1970)
Marion's Wall (1973)
The Night People (1977)
Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Stories (1983) (nonfiction)
About Time (1986)
Three by Finney (1987)
From Time to Time (1995)
