The Third Level Study Guide

Jack Finney was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on October 2, 1911. Although his birth name was John Finney, he was renamed Walter Braden Finney at age three in honor of his father after his death. He graduated from Knox College in 1934 and began work at an advertising agency in New York City. While working there, Finney published his first article, “Someone Who Knows Told Me…”, in the December 1943 issue of Cosmopolitan. This article, published during the height of the United States’s involvement in World War II, discouraged American citizens from making careless remarks about the war efforts. Finney’s experience living as a young adult during World War II would be influential on many of his works, including “The Third Level.” In 1946, he published his first short story, “The Widow’s Walk,” and published his first novel, 5 Against the House, in 1954. From the 1950s onwards, he was a prolific writer of science fiction, noir, and thrillers, and he became especially well-known for his 1955 novel The Body Snatchers. In 1987, he won the World Fantasy Convention’s World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Finney passed away from pneumonia and emphysema in 1995; he was survived by his wife, Marguerite, and their two children, Kenneth and Marguerite.

Jack Finney published “The Third Level” in 1952, only seven years after the end of World War II. The war had a cataclysmic impact on the entire world, not only due to its massive death toll but also horrific events such as the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both of which caused many people to question the inherent goodness of humanity. 1952 was also directly in the middle of the Korean War, which occurred between 1950-1953 and resulted in 3 million war-related deaths. This war was itself a proxy war spurred on by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the former supporting democratic South Korea and the latter supporting communist North Korea. The Cold War was an unsettling time for everyone on earth, as the escalating arms race between the United States and Soviet Union led to increased fear of a potentially world-ending nuclear war between the global powers. In essence, “The Third Level” was published during a period of immense societal trauma and instability, which explains its romanticization of the late 19th century, which was a time of peace in the United States (though, to be fair, 1894 wasn’t that long after the end of the Civil War in 1865).

Jack Finney’s work reached notoriety in the 1950s, a period known as the “Golden Age” for American science fiction due to the high volume of iconic science fiction writers forging their careers and shaping the genre. Some of the early writers of the Golden Age included Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein, whose works granted science fiction more respectability due to their strong prose and complex themes. As for Finney’s contemporaries, one particularly influential science fiction writer that also rose to popularity in the 1950s was Ray Bradbury, another writer who used science fiction themes to explore the pitfalls of modern humanity. Bradbury’s 1952 story, “A Sound of Thunder,” also focuses on time travel but approaches it from a significantly different perspective: rather than portraying time travel as a way to return to a simpler time as Finney does, Bradbury depicts time travel as a destructive force, with even the smallest changes in the past having potentially catastrophic echoes in the present. This hypothetical phenomenon, known as the “butterfly effect,” has been credited to “A Sound of Thunder” and is a much more common approach to time travel in present-day science fiction than Finney’s more idealistic depiction of it.