Jack Finney

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Jack Finney


Born
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, The United States
October 02, 1911

Died
November 14, 1995

Genre


Mr. Finney specialized in thrillers and works of science fiction. Two of his novels, The Body Snatchers and Good Neighbor Sam became the basis of popular films, but it was Time and Again (1970) that won him a devoted following. The novel, about an advertising artist who travels back to the New York of the 1880s, quickly became a cult favorite, beloved especially by New Yorkers for its rich, painstakingly researched descriptions of life in the city more than a century ago.

Mr. Finney, whose original name was Walter Braden Finney, was born in Milwaukee and attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. After moving to New York and working in the advertising industry, he began writing stories for popular magazines like Collier's, The Saturday Ev
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Average rating: 3.9 · 63,438 ratings · 6,217 reviews · 118 distinct worksSimilar authors
Time and Again (Time, #1)

3.94 avg rating — 25,157 ratings — published 1970 — 57 editions
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers

3.90 avg rating — 25,337 ratings — published 1955 — 21 editions
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From Time to Time (Time, #2)

3.69 avg rating — 5,135 ratings — published 1995 — 39 editions
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About Time: 12 Short Stories

4.06 avg rating — 1,794 ratings — published 1986 — 9 editions
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Three by Finney: The Woodro...

4.03 avg rating — 405 ratings — published 1987 — 3 editions
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Contents of the Dead Man's ...

3.56 avg rating — 417 ratings — published 1956 — 3 editions
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The Third Level

4.07 avg rating — 347 ratings — published 1948 — 14 editions
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Marion's Wall

3.84 avg rating — 165 ratings — published 1973 — 12 editions
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Forgotten News: The Crime o...

3.80 avg rating — 138 ratings — published 1983 — 6 editions
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The Night People

3.53 avg rating — 131 ratings — published 1977 — 6 editions
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More books by Jack Finney…
Time and Again From Time to Time
(2 books)
by
3.90 avg rating — 30,304 ratings

Quotes by Jack Finney  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?”
Jack Finney, Time and Again

“Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now.

For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time.

Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")”
Jack Finney, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“...we're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the great lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to pursued our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it.”
Jack Finney

Polls

August 2017- Vote For 1, Top 2 Win

Everything, Everything Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon by Nicola Yoon
My disease is as rare as it is famous. Basically, I’m allergic to the world. I don’t leave my house, have not left my house in seventeen years. The only people I ever see are my mom and my nurse, Carla.
But then one day, a moving truck arrives next door. I look out my window, and I see him. He’s tall, lean and wearing all black—black T-shirt, black jeans, black sneakers, and a black knit cap that covers his hair completely. He catches me looking and stares at me. I stare right back. His name is Olly.
 
  2 votes 18.2%

Lab Girl Lab Girl by Hope Jahren by Hope Jahren
Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahren’s stories: about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom’s labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science, and learned to perform lab work done “with both the heart and the hands”; and about the inevitable disappointments, but also the triumphs and exhilarating discoveries, of scientific work.
 
  2 votes 18.2%

The Little French Bistro The Little French Bistro by Nina George by Nina George
From the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of The Little Paris Bookshop, an extraordinary novel about self-discovery and new beginnings. Marianne is stuck in a loveless, unhappy marriage. After forty-one years, she has reached her limit, and one evening in Paris she decides to take action. Following a dramatic moment on the banks of the Seine, Marianne leaves her life behind and sets out for the coast of Brittany, also known as the end of the world.
 
  2 votes 18.2%

Time and Again Time and Again (Time, #1) by Jack Finney by Jack Finney
A story that will remain in the listener's memory, "Time and Again" is a remarkable blending of the troubled present and a nostalgic past, made vivid and extraordinarily moving by the images of a time that was...and perhaps still is.
 
  2 votes 18.2%

If We Were Villains If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio by M.L. Rio
Enter the players. There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us. Until that year, we saw no further than the books in front of our faces. Part coming-of-age story, part confession, If We Were Villains explores the magical and dangerous boundary between art and life. In this tale of loyalty and betrayal, madness and ecstasy, the players must choose what roles to play before the curtain falls.
 
  1 vote 9.1%

Perfect Perfect by Rachel Joyce by Rachel Joyce
In 1972, two seconds were added to time. It was in order to balance clock time with the movement of the earth. Byron Hemming knew this because James Lowe had told him and James was the cleverest boy at school. But how could time change? The steady movement of hands around a clock was as certain as their golden futures.
 
  1 vote 9.1%

West of Sunset West of Sunset by Stewart O'Nan by Stewart O'Nan
A “rich, sometimes heartbreaking” (Dennis Lehane) novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood...

Fitzgerald’s orbit of literary fame and the Golden Age of Hollywood is brought vividly to life through the novel’s romantic cast of characters, from Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway to Humphrey Bogart. A sympathetic and deeply personal portrait of a flawed man who never gave up in the end, even as his every wish and hope seemed thwarted, West of Sunset confirms O’Nan as “possibly our best working novelist”
 
  1 vote 9.1%

An Abundance of Katherines An Abundance of Katherines by John Green by John Green
Katherine V thought boys were gross
Katherine X just wanted to be friends
Katherine XVIII dumped him in an e-mail
K-19 broke his heart
When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type happens to be girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact.
 
  0 votes 0.0%

Swing Time Swing Time by Zadie Smith by Zadie Smith

Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them. Moving from northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time.
 
  0 votes 0.0%

The Rules of Half The Rules of Half by Jenna Patrick by Jenna Patrick
The Rules of Half explores what it is to be an atypical family in a small town and to be mentally ill in the wake of a tragedy--and who has the right to determine both.
 
  0 votes 0.0%

11 total votes
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