Time and Again was written in 1970 by Jack Finney who was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1911 and grew up to live in New York City and work for an advertising agency prior to moving to California in the 1950s where he lived until his death in 1995 at the age of 84.

In the novel, the protagonist also works at an advertising agency in New York and his name is Simon Morley. Simon's not very engaged by his job, or his life apparently, so he's an easy mark when he gets recruited by a secret government agency that's researching time travel. With lots of pain-staking education and training, Simon learns how to transport himself back to the 1880s, where he wants to uncover a mystery stemming from an old letter that his girlfriend has.

The home base for Simon to go back in time is the well-known Dakota Building on CPW at 72nd Street, which just adds to the book's magic as this building is fascinating to architecture buffs and Beatles fans alike.  The home base back in 1882 is at 19 Gramercy Park, another lovely area of the greatest city on earth.

Time and Again is a wonderfully rich book that takes you along for the ride, backwards and forwards through time.  An instant classic that you will read again and again.  I won't go into any more detail than that as you can learn just about everything about the book on wiki or amazon.  I do love time travel books and movies so much!

It's interesting to me that Finney manages to not create loose ends, like most authors of time travel books inevitably do.

Talking Points

Trivia

Like Simon Morley, a man named Charles Stoddard escaped the real fire by crawling along The Observer's sign board suspended from the window sills over upper floors and slanted out at the top so the public on the sidewalk below could see who was occupying the buildings, to the adjacent building, currently part of Pace University.  After the fire (another slight artistic license taken) 41 Park Row became the original home of the New York Times newspaper prior to their move to Times Square in 1903.