roadrunn's review of 28 May 2002 refers to the article "The Skin of Who's Teeth?" (sic) published in the Saturday Evening Post (sic) in 1945 (sic) --
"The Skin of *Whose* (emphasis in original) Teeth? or The Strange Case of Mr. Wilder's New Play and Finnegan's Wake" was serialized in two issues of the Saturday Review of Literature 25: December 19, 1942, at pp. 3-4 and February 13, 1943, at pp. 16-18.
From the Wikipedia article on Thornton Wilder, on the controversy surrounding the play: "It was claimed by Joseph Campbell and Robert (sic) Morton Robinson, authors of A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake, that much of the play was the result of unacknowledged borrowing from James Joyce's last work. (Footnotes 5&6)
"5. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson published a pair of reviews-cum-denunciations entitled 'The Skin of Whose Teeth?' in the Saturday Review immediately after the play's debut; these created a huge uproar at the time.
"6. Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, New World Library, 2004, pp. 257-66 reprints the reviews and discusses the controversy."
From Great American Writers: Twentieth Century, edited by R. Baird Shuman (Marshall Cavendish, New York, 2002), pp. 1646-47: "Criticism of this play was, for several decades, tainted by a mean-spirited series of articles by Henry M. Robinson and Joseph Campbell essentially accusing Wilder of plagiarizing The Skin of Our Teeth from James Joyce's novel Finnegan's Wake. Subsequent critics have vindicated Wilder, whose borrowings are nothing like plagiarism. Wilder openly admired Joyce, on whom he frequently lectured . . . ."
Wilder himself wrote in the Preface to Three Plays: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Matchmaker (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1957): "The play is deeply indebted to James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. I should be very happy if, in the future, some author should feel similarly indebted to any work of mine. Literature has always more resembled a torch race than a furious dispute among heirs."
