Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Eighth Day: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Eighth Day: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Eighth Day: A Novel
    Ebook570 pages11 hours

    The Eighth Day: A Novel

    By Thornton Wilder

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    “[Wilder's] finest and most beautiful novel. . . . 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.” — New York Post

    This beautiful edition of Thornton Wilder’s renowned 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novel features a foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on unique sources as Wilder’s unpublished letters, handwritten annotations, and other illuminating documentary material.

    At once a murder mystery and a philosophical tale, 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.

    Set in a mining town in southern Illinois, the novels centers around two families blasted apart when the patriarch of one family, John Ashley, is accused of murdering his best friend. Ashley's miraculous jailbreak on the eve of his execution and his subsequent flight to South America trigger a powerful story tracing the fates of all those whose lives are forever changed by the tragedy: Ashley himself, his wife and children, and the wife and children of the victim.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 25, 2014
    ISBN9780062232687
    Author

    Thornton Wilder

    Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. His Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, as did two of his four full-length dramas, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). Wilder's The Matchmaker was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly!. He also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, the opera, and films. (His screenplay for Hitchcock's Shadow of Doubt [1943] remains a classic psycho-thriller to this day.) Wilder's many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.

    Read more from Thornton Wilder

    Related to The Eighth Day

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Christmas Memory

      Nov 1, 2018

      A Christmas Memory
      18 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jesse Paddock

      Dec 9, 2020

      I’d gotten what I’d wanted—a room full of books and time enough to read them—but at a cost. The post A Year in Reading: Jesse Paddock appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Exhaustively Researched, Often Brilliant Biography Of Sylvia Plath

      Nov 7, 2020

      ALMOST six decades after her death, Sylvia Plath stands as the most consequential poet of her generation. As a feminine voice, she dominates the 20th century. At the time of Plath’s death at age 30, critic A Alvarez wrote: “The loss to literature is

      13 min read

    • Article

      California Dreaming

      Mar 31, 2020

      Rishi Reddi’s first novel, Passage West, is an audacious piece of work. On the one hand, the author situates her story in a California most of us won’t recognize: the Imperial Valley early in the previous century, when South Asians worked the irrigat

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Bryan Washington

      Dec 3, 2018

      1. This year, I read a lot on my phone. That’s a habit I’ve picked up from working gigs where you stand a bunch (watching kids on a swingset, watching adult children park their cars). Some folks don’t vibe with that, but those folks don’t pay my bill

      4 min read

    • Article

      Clarence Page: The Age-old Trick Of ‘Passing’: Fiction Writer The Latest To Be Disgraced By Lies About Heritage

      Mar 20, 2023

      I have never known a man who faked his own death, but I have known a man who faked his own life, then sadly failed to live long enough for us to talk about it. I’m talking about the late Hache Carrillo, a rising, award-winning literary talent whose r

      3 min read

    • Article

      Quiet on the Set: William Boyd on His Latest Novel

      Nov 18, 2020

      I think of a novelist as a magpie rather than a scholar. Anything bright that catches your eye can be brought into the work. The post Quiet on the Set: William Boyd on His Latest Novel appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      King Charles’s Ruthless Revenge

      Sep 29, 2022

      IN ACT OF OBLIVION, Robert Harris brings his unrivalled ability to create vivid historical characters within tightly-honed plots to the turbulent Civil Wars and Restoration of mid-seventeenth century Britain and America. It is 1660 and Charles II has

      3 min read

    • Article

      Interlude

      Mar 28, 2022

      Interlude
      10 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2022

      Golden Gate Park As any poet will tell you, the weight of the lineis essential, but here these practitioners havemore on their minds than poems. The weight of their lines is uniformly light, the line selectedto land and then rest gently on the surfac

      2 min read

    • Article

      Visible Man

      Dec 2, 2019

      Visible Man
      4 min read

    • Article

      Re-Covered: The Mischief

      Dec 2, 2019

      Re-Covered: The Mischief
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Look Ahead To The Best New Books In 2021: From Marcus Rashford To Bill Gates

      Jan 7, 2021

      Celebrity self-help titles, race, colonialism, gender and identity politics are the big themes in non-fiction, while in fiction publishers have splurged on commissioning lots of débuts alongside the more established names. Plenty of treats in store -

      6 min read

    • Article

      I Don’t Trust Images: The Millions Interviews Ottessa Moshfegh

      Dec 27, 2018

      My approach to writing was like a little volatile. Sort of like “fuck you," what drove a lot of my creativity—not all the time, but I can identify that. The post I Don’t Trust Images: The Millions Interviews Ottessa Moshfegh appeared first on The Mil

      11 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Eighth Day

    4/5

    86 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I read the hardcover published in 1967. This was not easy to read nor understand, but a very worthwhile book. There are so many metaphors presented so well I'm sure I missed many. There are also too many characters to keep track of. However, Wilder makes many comments on human behavior and the lack of humanity that I found this as relevant today as it was in the past. Most of the booki takes place in the 1880's until the 1920's, but Wilder also discusses both earlier and later times. He tells us mainly about 2 families who are brought together by a misattributed tragedy.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book and its odd narrative structure: the plot was intriguing and the prose was distinctive. So, why do I dock it a star? I thought the characters were unbelievable and the things that happened to them implausible. I wished for a bit more showing and a bit less telling.

      There's something very Midwestern about the book. It captures the puritanical mindset that still exists out here in a non-condescending manner, and that is a very difficult thing. Hard work is rewarded, acts of charity are done silently. Bad things happen to good people, but the good never suffer. To me the novel is unsettling, but it embodies a distinctively American philosophy that I see around me but can never know nor understand.
    • 4/5
      In the beginning John Ashley came from New York, hired as a maintenance engineer to repair and fortify the mines of Coaltown, Illinois. Breckenridge Lansing was the managing director of the mines. This is how their paths would cross, innocently enough. Their paths would uncross when John shoots Breckenridge in the back of the head. Simple enough. After John is convicted and is on his way to be executed for the crime he somehow escapes. For the first part of the book we follow John's trek to Chile where he resumes his mine work. The rest of the book follows the lives of the people he left behind: his wife and children, Breck's widow and children. While the story meanders through philosophy and religion, the storyline is clear. There is something definitely amiss about this murder. John claims he is innocent and yet he was the only one with a gun.
    • 4/5
      In the foreword to this volume, John Updike says about the book "Reviews were mixed, from Edmund Wilson's calling it 'the best thing he ever wrote' to...Stanley Kaufmann's [judgment] that 'we have – from a man who has always meant well – a book that means nothing.'" And, in a certain way, that divergence of opinion (a divergence that is evident in the many reviews of the book) is a nutshell of the reading experience. At times it was one of the finest books I ever read; at others I felt myself tempted to skim past descriptions or dissertations and even wonder why a certain section was included.But, somewhere in between "greatest book" and "book that means nothing" is the crux of it. This is a very good book that sometimes stumbles on itself, but only because it is attempting to grasp and attempt quite a bit.Harlan Ellison begins "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" with the line "Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself." And that is as good a description of the plot line for this novel as I have seen – we start with a murder and trial, but then jump between the histories occurring before the event and the developments long afterwards.The very beginning of the Prologue starts with John Barrington Ashley being tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing. They were friends, and everyone knows Ashley was not the murderer. However, that is not the outcome of the trial and Ashley is convicted. On the train ride to prison Ashely is freed; no one has any idea who freed him – not even Ashley.That story, along with the subsequent explorations of how Lansing actually died and who freed Ashley, would take up the average, everyday novel. However, this is the least of what Wilder is trying to do. Again, this is the middle of the story.What follows is an exploration of certain Ashely and Langston family members, as well as residents of Coaltown, Illinois. We see how people survived after the trial, we see the past that brought these two families to the Illinois coal town, and, most importantly, we see how these events shaped the people they have become and the people they will become. While we learn who the people really are, this does not serve to drive forward a plot of "what happened?" (Part of the reason the book is dismissed as meaning nothing). Instead, it serves Wilder's bigger purpose of showing the way lives evolve and how we are all evolving into something new and different. (Is it for the better? That is a decision he leaves up to the reader.) Some of the discussions of theories and religious concepts can (as one early reviewer noted) sound like essays embedded in a novel. And yet they serve well the purpose of showing that particular individual's development. And, by digging deeply into multiple characters, different points of view are brought forward with equal authority. By the end, the answers to the mysteries are provided. But those have become nothing more than a necessary interference to the bigger questions that are raised throughout the novel. Those bigger questions do not have nicely-tied answers, as evidenced by Wilder's last paragraph. But, even without answers, we learn.The book is a pleasant voyage. While the characters are not necessarily brilliantly dynamic (something we seem to expect in books that we don't expect of real people in real life) they have a reality that helps us accept them on their own terms. And, even with the essay-like discussions, the book continues to drive forward. I found myself caught up in the people and in those discussions. What more do we really want from a novel?
    • 4/5
      A really good book with great writing. The plot however is a little unsettling, moving backwards and forwards through time, never really going where you expect it too.
    • 3/5
      This book struck me as being in the tradition of George Eliot- an effort to both entertain and edify the reading public. Its focus on familial influences and the meaning of faith, hope and charity aroused my interest and sympathies. I'm not sure his critique of humour is definitive, but it is understandable that such a serious work should support its own essential seriousness.
    • 5/5
      In his book, The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder brings us a gripping tale of two families whose lives are shattered by a mysterious murder. The husband and father of one family is falsely convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of the other husband and father. With help from unknown benefactors he escapes from the train carrying him to Joliet and lives the life of a fugitive. Set in a small midwestern mining town at the turn of the 20th century, we watch how the two young families and particularly the children of the accused cope with their drastically changed circumstances. The mother of the accused never leaves her house and it is up to the children to keep the family from the real threat of the poorhouse. The author gives us the unusual background and upbringing of the principle characters to make sense of their present behavior under pressure. There are the mysteries of who was the murderer and who helped the fugitive escape which are not discovered until the final few pages. Written in a highly skilled and interesting manner by a master storyteller.
    • 4/5
      Curious book. A murder mystery that almost completely loses sight of the murder and the mystery. A wide-ranging family saga that loses its protagonist half-way through.
    • 4/5
      Wow. I really enjoyed this book. There are so many ideas to chew on. Not that I agree with all of them, but they are very well put and worth taking a look at. Aside from all the philosophy, the story is interesting also. I don't think the author understood the concept of original sin and its affect on the world. Until that is understood, this world and its problems cannot be sorted out.