Regular marked price: $15.95Discount Price: $11.92
Cost Savings: $4.03 (25%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN num: 9780060088910
ISBN number: 0060088915
Label: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 512
Printing Date: January 01, 2007
Publishing house: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Release Date: January 02, 2007
Sale Popularity Level: 394334
Studio: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
This new edition of Thornton Wilder's renowned 1967 National Book Award–winning novel features a new foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on such unique sources as Wilder's unpublished letters, handwritten annotations in the margins of the book, and other illuminating documentary material.
In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent twenty months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the Rio Grande border 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.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
In The Eight Day, Thorton Wilder tackles life's great question: is there a design to existence, or is it all an accident? Is there some structure to the cosmos and the human place within it, or is it some universal happenstance? Wilder, near the end, seems to come down on the side of design with the ruminations of the old Indian leader of the "cult" above Coaltown. But he seems unable to hold this vision. On page 145 one character ruminates: "Life affords no second chances... Is this what growing older is - seeing always more clearly the things we failed to see?" And this gem later on: "His parents were both forty when he was ten - that is to say they were beginning to be resigned to the knowledge that life was disappointing and basically meaningless." No matter how hard a person holds onto the desire for order, the pull toward disorder is stronger. Wilder creates a novel with characters of a type, etched in the fictional equivalent of stone. They are contending with mighty destinies, against a backdrop which marks them for greatness and flux. In this way the novel gets its great strength and weakness. It is a monumental achievement, but lacks the reality of real life experience. Wilder here is testing ideas rather than fleshing a living fictional reality.
Rated by buyers -
Majestic! Wilder came closer than most to writing The Great American Novel. "The Eighth Day" appears to be the template for the novels of John Irving.
Rated by buyers -
Set in a dismal Illinois coal town around the turn of the twentieth century, resident John Ashley is accused of killing Breckenridge Lansing, the money-grubbing, incompetent owner of the coal mine; he is found guilty and sentenced to be executed. But on his way to prison, he is suddenly rescued by six unidentified men and set free. He makes his way to Chile, puts his engineering background and love of mathematics to good use, and eventually makes his way back to the US. Ashley becomes a "man of faith," that faith being defined as a belief in a better, more caring, American community. (A new beginning = the Eighth Day.) One character says, "The [human] race is undergoing its education. What is education? It is the bridge man crosses from the self-enclosed, self-favoring life into a consciousness of the entire community of mankind." The "heroes" of the novel are those who defy the conventions that would keep them from crossing that bridge (Lily Ashley pursues a career as a singer, defying Victorian conventions) and those who wash their hands of the filthy pursuit of materialistic well-being (Roger Ashley becomes a muckraking journalist in Chicago eager to help the poor). The truth of John Ashley's innocence of the crime is revealed at the end (though Wilder tells us he's innocent in the Prologue). An annoying feature of the book is Wilder's blunt moralizing, especially near the end; characters are forced to make these little speeches about "false hopes" and "people changing" that make them suddenly appear remote and snobbish. (I'm not criticizing the message here, only Wilder's methods.) Wilder holds out a great deal of hope for the future of America, though he believes the road ahead is perilous with lots of false turns possible. This is his most ambitious novel, and it won the National Book Award in 1968.
Rated by buyers -
There is a poor John mine is southern Illinois in Coaltown. The mine mechanic is charged with and convicted of the murder of the general manager. The two leading families in the town had been those of the general manager and the mine mechanic. The better man of the two was the mechanic. He had worked with the manager and had given him credit for things he accomplished.
The mechanic is sentenced to death but escapes through the work of an unknown group of men. One of the daughters decides that in order to carry on she and her family must run a boarding house. At the time people feared being relegated to the poor house.
The hopeful find nourishment in marvels. Eventually John Ashley, the condemned man, makes his way to Chile to work in the copper mines. The root of avarice is the fear of what circumstances might bring. Ashley had tried to live in a manner opposite that of his father who was a miser.
After the crisis and while the boarding house was being started, John Ashley's son Roger, age seventeen, moved to Chicago. In the beginning he was a dishwasher. Quickly he moved through jobs as a hotel clerk and an orderly. Roger met some journalists and resolved to become a newspaper man.
He was starved for food of the spirit. Once he was given a ticket to FIDELIO. After being in Chicago eighteen months he became a reporter. Roger met his sister, the musician of the family, in Chicago. His sister Lily's friend, the Maestro, told Roger that works of art are the only satisfactory productions of civilization.
Roger and his sister hit upon a plan to use their real extravagant middle names and last names in their newspaper work and singing respectively to enable their father to contact them. John Ashley had gone to engineering school in Hoboken. He met his wife Beata Kellerman there. Beata had been formed by her parents' best principles, but her parents did not recognize them. All young people secrete idealism.
In the end the child who started the boarding house and saved the family broke down and ended up in the poor house. Everyone else was successful and the mystery of the murder of the general manager was solved.
Thornton Wilder employs many myths drawn from history of the settlement of the west, including the settlement by unusual religious communities. This work resembles the novels of Willa Cather. It is excellent.
Rated by buyers -
I was wonderfully surprised by Wilder's writing style. This was the very first novel of his that I read and found myself moved by his ever present ideologies regarding life, death, family etc. The book doesn't use dramatic crescendo's to keep the reader's attention, instead it's Wilder's ability to make the each character's daily struggle very human or common.
I would recommend this book to reader's who enjoy books that are more intellectual, filled with philosophical insight, perhaps similar to that of Rand.
Find other books like this one:
