Three by Finney

Jack Finney was born on October 2, 1911 with the given name John Finney. His father died when he was three years old and he was renamed Walter Braden Finney in honor of his father. He 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 Evening Post and McCall's.

His first novel, "Five Against the House" (1954), told the story of five college students who plot to rob a casino in Reno. A year later he published "The Body Snatchers" which was later reissued as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Many critics interpreted the insidious infiltration by aliens as a cold-war allegory that dramatized America's fear of a takeover by Communists. Mr. Finney maintained that the novel was nothing more than popular entertainment. The 1956 film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was remade twice. With "Time and Again," Mr. Finney won the kind of critical praise and attention not normally accorded to genre fiction.

Finney died November 16, 1995 of pneumonia and emphysema at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 84.

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