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HOW DID CELEBRATED BOOKS GET THEIR NAMES? Continuing our series, we look at the story behind James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20050327
Author:GARY DEXTER

FINNEGANS WAKE was known throughout a good part of its history as ``Work in Progress'', and was published as such in instalments from 1924 to 1939. The real title was a secret that James Joyce revealed only to his wife, Nora; not even Samuel Beckett knew it, as we can see from a critical study of the book from 1929 by Beckett and others: ``Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress''. The closely guarded title has resonances from Irish ballad (Tim Finnegan, the hod-carrier who fell from a roof) and Irish legend (Finnegan is a second Finn McCool, or ``Finn ...

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