Charles G. Finney

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-09-27

Charles G. Finney (1905-1984) was an American newspaperman and writer, a great-grandson of the nineteenth-century evangelist of the same name. He served in the United States Army in China in the late 1920s, an experience that fed the Chinese mythology of his fiction, and then spent his working life on the staff of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. His first novel, The Circus of Dr. Lao, was rejected by Harper's in 1934 and published by the Viking Press in July 1935, with illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff; the following year it won one of the first four National Book Awards, in the short-lived category of Most Original Book. He published little else: the novel The Unholy City (1937), the story collection The Ghosts of Manacle (1964) and the novella The Magician Out of Manchuria (1968). The Circus of Dr. Lao was filmed by George Pal as 7 Faces of Dr. Lao in 1964 and has remained almost continuously in print.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) · The Circus of Dr. Lao Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 1 book
• Award recognitions across all universes: 1 (1 won)

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