The Eighth Day

Description

Thornton Wilder’s renowned 1967 National Book Award–winning novel features a foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on unique sources as Wilder’s unpublished letters, handwritten annotations in the margins, and other illuminating documentary material.In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent twenty months in hibernation away from family and friends, in the town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched The Eighth Day, a tale set in a mining town in southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful story tracing the fate of his and the victim’s wife and children.

At once a murder mystery and a philosophical story, The Eighth Day is a “suspenseful and deeply moving” (New York Times) work of classic stature that has been hailed as a great American epic.

“The profoundest, most versatile and most consistently experimental…American writer.” “Brilliant and daring…In a major work of the imagination, [Wilder] has raised the ultimate questions and sent them whirling their deep spirals with a wit and intelligence no other American novelist of the moment can match.” “One of the country’s recognized master artists has produced his best and most absorbing novel.” “Wilder’s prose more than meets the challenge of his theme. It moves with superb smoothness and power. It combines the dramatic vigor and vividness of the playwright (Our Town, Skin of Our Teeth) with the best of prose writing. Many times it rises into majesty.” “Thornton Wilder has come up with his finest and most beautiful novel…a work of classic stature….Spacious, eloquent and moving, it assumes a kind of cosmic grandeur….Spanning two continents and several generations, it begins as a murder mystery and goes on to tell a story, at once dramatic and philosophical, about the range of human courage, aspirations, steadfastness, weakness, defeat and victory.”

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