Word: wilder
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...Thornton Wilder's total literary output is small-six novels, four full-length plays. But if it is not a three-foot shelf, it bears witness to an original mind and a remarkable skill-The Skin of Our Teeth, Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey are genuine American classics...
...Wilder has always insisted that he is not a writer but a teacher. He is both, of course. The Eighth Day, his first novel in 18 years, combines his special gift for evoking what is warmly sentimental in the American character with his favorite notions about the universality of human nature. But where Wilder's prose was honed to succinct statements of affirmation in the past, it is now lengthened and pedantic. His lyrical qualities are diffused, his plot ambiguous and his theme labyrinthine...
Hero-Victim. "In the early summer of 1902," begins Wilder, "John Barrington Ashley of Coaltown, a small mining center in southern Illinois, was tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing, also of Coaltown. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Five days later, at 1 in the morning of Tuesday, July 22, he escaped from his guards on the train that was carrying him to his execution...
Expanding from this simple outline, Wilder embarks on a meandering parable of Good (Ashley) v. Evil (Lansing), that reaches into the genealogies of both men and their families as well as giving a detailed geographic and geologic history of the region. Ashley is fearless and worldly; yet he is a simple innocent, a hero-victim in mankind's headlong flight from the primal ooze. Lansing is a Babbitt, successful in business, boastful and bullying-a man who stands in direct contrast to the Ashleys of this world...
...Slowly, Wilder traces out the threads in the fabric of Lansing's life and his near-redemption; of Ashley, rescued from his prison train by a mysterious band of unarmed intruders; of the Lansing and Ashley children, and their children, until they are all sewed into meaningful stitches in God's (or Wilder's) design...