The Woodrow Wilson Dime by Jack Finney

The Woodrow Wilson Dime by Jack Finney (Italian edition)
The Woodrow Wilson Dime by Jack Finney (Italian edition)

The novel “The Woodrow Wilson Dime” by Jack Finney was published for the first time in 1968. An updated version containing some changes to a few elements of the novel considered obsolete was published in 1987.

Ben Bennell lives a boring life. His relationship with his wife Hetty has become colder and colder through the years and things don’t go very well at his work. One day, Ben finds a strange ten-cent coin with the face of Woodrow Wilson that literally opens the door to a parallel universe in which he’s happily married to the beautiful Tess and he has a successful career at his work which gave him a sense of accomplishment.

For a while, Ben lives happily and tries to take advantage of the differences he discovered between the two universes trying to “invent” anything that doesn’t exist there. After some time, however, Ben meets the alternate universe’s Hetty and against all logic he realizes he wants to go back to his original wife. However, it seems that both universes are creating a series of difficulties to keep him from succeeding.

“The Woodrow Wilson Dime” is a story told in first person by its protagonist Ben Bennell, who immediately starts making us realize how dull is his life. Ben fantasizes about doing something to break his dull routine, even something drastic such as killing his wife Hetty. Actually he has no negative feelings towards her, it’s just that it’s become difficult to keep their marriage alive.

Everything changes when Ben finds himself in a parallel universe due to a fortuitous event. Initially, he doesn’t realize what happened to him but when he understands his situation and finds out that it’s much better compared to the one in his universe he thinks he can finally be happy.

However, when Ben meets Hetty’s alter-ego, he realizes the value of everything he used to find boring. Therefore, he wants to go back to his universe and resume his old life but things have changed there. Ben didn’t know what he had until it was gone and he must find a way to put things right.

Put like that, “The Woodrow Wilson Dime” sounds like a vaguely philosophical and a bit corny novel that uses the science fiction concept of parallel universes. Actually, from its beginning it’s clear that Ben Bennell’s adventures and especially his misadventures are told in a humorous way.

“The Woodrow Wilson Dime” is essentially a comedy with science fiction elements. It’s not easy to label it because there’s no real explanation for the fact that finding the right coin is enough to travel between universes. It’s one of those cases where it’s better not to dwell too much on the genre the novel should belong to because labelling it would be mean in some way caging it limting the possibility to enjoy it.

“The Woodrow Wilson Dime” is structured like a comedy, with a series of hilarious moments but also some sad moments. As in many comedies, this novel deals with serious topics such as taking for granted what we have just to regret it when we lose it. The pace is fast but the characters are not well developed and this is inevitable for a kind of story like this one.

In science fiction, there have been some authors who have written humorous stories but probably only the novel “What Mad Universe” by Fredric Brown has points in common with “The Woodrow Wilson Dime”.

Jack Finney wrote mostly works more dramatic than this one and became famous for some of them but in his career there were some cases when he used more light-hearted elements in his works.

Personally, I found “The Woodrow Wilson Dime” very funny so I recommend reading it with the caveat to consider it a comedy rather than a science fiction novel.

1 Comment


  1. I enjoyed this tale so much I actually dreamt of it and saw the Coca-Coola sign mentioned in the story. I described the story (while awake) to an old friend from grade school, who
    was unimpressed and frankly puzzled by it. I discovered that he didn’t know who was on the regular dime, and, furthermore, didn’t care. That seemed almost as fantastic to me as the premise of the story. Such quotidian insouciance!

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