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Thornton Wilder: The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings

Edited by J. D. McClatchy

“You have to hand it to a writer willing to attack the big questions head on, and to embed those questions in the story of small-town America, and then surround it all in the grandeur of the grandeur of America, and then abase some of its citizens for venality while others rise to existential heights.”—Harold Augenbraum, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation

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Overview

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Click here to save $40 when you buy all three LOA Thornton Wilder volumes

The final phase of Thornton Wilder’s illustrious career was marked by a triumphant return to the novel, a form he had eschewed after the publication of The Ides of March in 1948, questioning its continued viability as a means of artistic expression. The National Book Award–winning The Eighth Day (1967)—according to Wilder, his only “real novel”—put all such questions to flight. It is an epic tale, at once expansive and nuanced, of two American families and their intertwined destinies. John Ashley, a mining engineer in Coaltown, Illinois, is sentenced to death for the murder of his colleague Breckenridge Lansing, but just hours before his execution, a strange and audacious raid sets him free. Out of this “unimportant case in a small Middlewestern town,” Wilder created a story that opens onto philosophical and religious speculation, revisiting the themes of earlier works such as Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and summing up his deepest concerns. The Eighth Day’s “principal idea,” he wrote in 1968, is “that Man is not a final and arrested creation, but is evolving toward higher mental and spiritual faculties.”

Couched in a lighter vein, Theophilus North (1973) shows Wilder taking a wry backward glance at his youthful self to fashion a “joking autobiography.” Like the title character (named for Wilder’s twin who died at birth), he had spent a summer in the 1920s working as a tutor in Newport, Rhode Island. A series of loosely connected tales bound by place and mood, Theophilus North is an enchanting work of mischievous wit and elegantly comic storytelling, suffused with fondness for the recollected charms of Newport and its “nine cities.”

Wilder’s autobiographical urge is even more evident in the three pieces that conclude the volume, chapters of a never-before-published manuscript from the late 1960s. Writing of his past while permitting himself fictional touches, he engagingly evokes his childhood stay at a boarding school in China, his time as an undergraduate at Yale, and the uneasy experience of visiting Salzburg, Austria, amid the inescapable political tensions of 1937.

J. D. McClatchy (1945–2018) was the author of many books of poetry and essays, including Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems (2014), and the editor of nine Library of America publications. He wrote the libretto for Ned Rorem’s operatic version of Our Town, taught at Yale University, and served as editor of The Yale Review.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Thornton Wilder: The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings is published with support from The Agnes Gund Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Video Our Town for Our Time: How Thornton Wilder’s Play Speaks to a Changing America and Around the World
August 4, 2022

News Our Town: A play about the ways we remember and misremember the past
April 14, 2022

Story of the Week Thornton Wilder, “Eddy Greater”
April 14, 2022

News “A foretaste of heaven”: Thornton Wilder’s childhood in China
April 14, 2022

News Penelope Niven on Thornton Wilder, reading
April 13, 2022

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-146-6 788 pages

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N° 224 Library of America Series

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