Jack Finney

Early career

In the 1940s, Finney moved to New York City, where he worked as an advertising copywriter. While holding a full-time job and raising a young family, he wrote fiction in the evenings, eventually selling short stories to magazines.

Writing career

Finney's first article, "Someone Who Knows Told Me...", published in the December 1943 issue of Cosmopolitan, has been described in later sources as reflecting the wartime message of the U.S. Office of War Information’s "Loose lips sink ships" campaign.

His story "The Widow's Walk" won a contest sponsored by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1946. His first novel, 5 Against the House, was published in 1954. It was made into a movie the following year.

Finney's story "Such Interesting Neighbors" (Collier's, 6 January 1951) was the basis for the second episode of Science Fiction Theatre, entitled "Time Is Just a Place". It was first broadcast on 16 April 1955. It co-starred Don DeFore and Warren Stevens; it was then published in 1957, in the collection The Third Level by Rhinehart and Company; later, the story appeared as an episode of the Steven Spielberg-created anthology series Amazing Stories, starring Adam Ant and Marcia Strassman. Spielberg's version was first broadcast on 20 March 1987.

Finney's breakout success came in 1955 with The Body Snatchers, followed by a steady career as a novelist and short-story writer. The Body Snatchers (1955) was the basis for the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers and multiple remakes.

Another novel, Assault on a Queen (1959), became the film Assault on a Queen with Frank Sinatra as the leader of a gang that pulls a daring robbery of the RMS Queen Mary.

Finney's 1959 short story "The Love Letter", which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, was adapted in 1998 into the television movie The Love Letter, starring Campbell Scott and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

His comedic novel Good Neighbor Sam (1963) was inspired by his early career in the advertising business; it was adapted into a 1964 film starring Jack Lemmon.

In addition to his fiction, Finney wrote two plays. Telephone Roulette: A Comedy in One Act (1956) is a short romantic one-act comedy adapted from an earlier, unpublished story ("Take a Number"). This Winter’s Hobby (1966) is a three-act melodrama that premiered in New Haven and Philadelphia, centering on a middle-aged businessman blackmailed by two young men into performing a series of humiliating tasks. Although there were plans to move the play to Broadway, it closed after its regional runs, and the script remains obscure.

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 to achieve time travel. 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 and for the art and photographs supposedly made by Morley during his experiences, which are reproduced in the pages of the novel. 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 neighborhood).

In 1995, twenty-five years after Time and Again, Finney published a sequel called From Time to Time featuring the further adventures of Morley, this time centering on Manhattan in 1912. Finney died at the age of 84, not long after publishing the book.

Themes

Scholars and critics frequently note Finney's sustained fascination with time and time travel, which became one of the defining through-lines of his work. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction observes that from early in his career he repeatedly "experimented" with time-travel concepts in short fiction — most famously in "The Third Level" (1950), about a man who accidentally wanders onto the third level of New York's Grand Central Terminal. He soon realizes that he has stumbled upon a direct passage to 1894. The 1951 story "I'm Scared" told the tale of a man wearing 19th-century clothes who was hit by a car in 1951. Finney's 1968 novel The Woodrow Wilson Dime again explored the possibilities of time travel; "the dime of the title allows the novel's hero to enter a parallel world in which he achieves fame by composing the musicals of Oscar Hammerstein and inventing the zipper". Finney again explored the theme at novel length in Time and Again (1970) and its sequel From Time to Time (1995). These novels, and the stories — collected in About Time (1986, Simon & Schuster) — helped solidify his reputation for imaginative treatments of altered or overlapping timelines.

Another consistent motif identified in criticism is Finney's focus on ordinary individuals placed in extraordinary or uncanny situations. As a writer, he excelled at depicting the collision of the everyday and the fantastic, highlighting how commonplace settings and unassuming protagonists form the backdrop for sudden incursions of the mysterious or supernatural. This interplay between the familiar and the fantastical, whether through time travel or subtle shifts in reality, became central to his appeal across short stories and novels.

Personal life and death

Finney married Marguerite Guest, and they had two children: Kenneth and Marguerite. He moved with his family to California in the early 1950s, eventually setting in Mill Valley.

Finney was a shy and private man, who rarely granted interviews. For decades he declined publicity and avoided public literary life, speaking to journalists only late in his career. A 1995 New York Times Magazine article noted his quiet routines and strong attachment to family life, including the support he received from his wife and children. It also highlighted his eccentric streak, reflected in his lifelong fascination with the past, his habit of collecting old magazines and photographs, and the deep personal pleasure he took in researching earlier eras.

Finney died of pneumonia and emphysema in Greenbrae, California, at the age of 84.

Awards

In 1987, Finney was given the World Fantasy Award—Life Achievement at the World Fantasy Convention, held in Nashville, Tennessee.

The Third Level, Knox College's online science fiction and fantasy publication, is named for alumnus Finney's short story "The Third Level", published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in October 1952.