Jack Finney was born Walter Braden Finney in Milwaukee in 1911. To judge from the biographical information he has made available, Finney is a writer who values his privacy. A fragmentary, whimsical biographical sketch in Collier's (5 April 1947) portrays him as a writer of advertising jingles in New York. The jacket flaps and settings of more recent works inform us that he is now living in Mill Valley, California. His earliest writings were suspense stories, and in fact his short story "The Widow's Walk" took a special prize in the second annual competition sponsored by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. His first story was published in 1946, and he began thereafter to write prolifically for the slick magazines. His first novel, 5 Against the House (1954), in which a group of bored college students in search of excitement plan and execute an elaborate robbery of Harold's Club in Reno, sets the pattern for his suspense stories. The theme looks forward to Assault on a Queen (1959), where the thieves are somewhat older and the target is the Queen Mary (it became a successful Paramount film in 1966, with a screenplay by Rod Serling).
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