In the time since Joyce's death, the book's admirers have struggled against public perception of the work to make exactly this argument for "Finnegans Wake". One of the book's early champions was Thornton Wilder, who wrote to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in August 1939, a few months after the book's publication: "One of my absorptions [...] has been James Joyce's new novel, digging out its buried keys and resolving that unbroken chain of erudite puzzles and finally coming on lots of wit, and lots of beautiful things has been my midnight recuperation. A lot of thanks to him". The publication in 1944 of the first in-depth study and analysis of Joyce's final text—"A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake" by mythologist Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson—tried to prove to a skeptical public that if the hidden key or "Monomyth" could be found, then the book could be read as a novel with characters, plot, and an internal coherence. As a result, from the 1940s to the 1960s critical emphasis moved away from positioning the "Wake" as a "revolution of the word" and towards readings that stressed its "internal logical coherence", as "the avant-gardism of "Finnegans Wake" was put on hold deferred while the text was rerouted through the formalistic requirements of an American criticism inspired by New Critical dicta that demanded a poetic intelligibility, a formal logic, of texts." Slowly the book's critical capital began to rise to the point that, in 1957, Northrop Frye described "Finnegans Wake" as the "chief ironic epic of our time" and Anthony Burgess lauded the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." Concerning the importance of such laughter, Darragh Greene has argued that the "Wake" through its series of puns, neologisms, compounds, and riddles shows the play of Wittgensteinian language-games, and by laughing at them, the reader learns how language makes the world and is freed from its snares and bewitchment.