The best thing he ever wrote, observed Edmund Wilson of Thornton
Wilder's National Book Award winner The Eighth Day (1967), an
enthralling novel that shows Wilder revisiting the small-town America of
Our Town to fashion a philosophical whodunit. A wrongful conviction
for murder and a daring rescue lead to a meditation on justice, destiny,
and the impassioned will, for which nothing is impossible. Wilder's last
novel, the semi-autobiographical Theophilus North (1973), is an
affectionate portrait of Newport, Rhode Island, in the 1920s and a
playful, valedictory glance at Wilder's young manhood. Completing this
volume are three never-before- published reminiscences taken from an
unfinished autobiography in which Wilder engagingly recalls his
childhood stay at a boarding school in China, his time as an
undergraduate at Yale, and the uneasy experience of visiting Salzburg
not long before Austria was annexed by the Nazis.
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