The Eighth Day

by Thornton Wilder

  [p. 435] There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. . . . ?

  “These catalogues in the form of parallel sentences are often found in the works of Gertrude Stein.”

  IN HIS HAND

  Shown here are the final handwritten and typed versions of the novel’s opening lines. At the final hour, the author chooses to shrink the Ashley Case from a national to a regional story, and suggests a range of possibilities for the only possible verdict—guilty!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The back matter of this volume is constructed in large part from Thornton Wilder’s words in unpublished material or publications not easy to come by. I hope readers will find that this approach brings the work and the man into view in a personal way. Those interested in further information about Thornton Wilder are referred to standard sources and to the bibliography available at www.thorntonwildersociety.org. This resource includes a special section devoted to the novel’s universal themes written by students of his work in this country and abroad. Readers interested in additional background on the Wilder family are referred to Amos N. Wilder’s “Thornton Wilder and His Public” (1980), an essay by the author’s older brother that includes biographical information and reflection. The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume I (1997) contains the two “Ages” and two “Sins” that Wilder permitted to be published in his lifetime, as well as two “Ages” and five “Sins” that he did not complete to his satisfaction. I have adopted the definition of a “short novel”—falling between 20,000 and 60,000 words—that Edward Weeks proposed in his influential edition of Great Short Novels, published in 1941 by the Literary Guild of America.

  I am indebted to J. D. McClatchy, Robin Wilder, Jackson Bryer, Claudette Walsh, and the staff of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for their support and advice in the making of this book. Penelope Niven has been of special and invaluable assistance all along the way. Olivia Gunston and Ellen Wilhite deserve thanks for helping with many a practical task. Curtis A. Foster and Scott Lehman in Douglas, James Turner in Tucson, and Newman Porter, Esq. from Phoenix helped me get a fix on the character of Douglas, Arizona, in the early 1960s. If there are errors in the Afterword, I take responsibility for them, and welcome corrections. All of us involved with this Wilder reprint series owe special thanks to John Updike for his willingness to revisit a novel he first read and judged in another century. His appreciation for Thornton Wilder and his patience with the author’s nephew are now, fortunately, part of the record.

  SOURCES AND PERMISSIONS

  Unless otherwise noted, all excerpts quoted from unpublished sources come from Thornton Wilder’s correspondence, manuscripts, and related records in the Thornton Wilder Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL) in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, or from the Wilder family’s own holdings, including many of Wilder’s legal and agency papers. Silent corrections in spelling and punctuation have been made when deemed appropriate. Richard Goldstone’s letters are held in the Thornton Wilder Collection, Fales Manuscripts, Fales Library, New York University, and his letters to Ruth Gordon by the Garson Kanin Estate. Marvin J. Taylor’s assistance at NYU and Martha J. Wilson’s with the Kanin Estate are gratefully acknowledged. One previously published letter has been cited: Wilder’s December 8, 1964, letter to Cass Canfield. It appears in facsimile in the latter’s memoir, Up and Down and Around: A Publisher Recollects the Time of His Life (New York: A Harper’s Magazine Press Book, 1971), 102–103.

  PUBLICATIONS

  Flora Lewis’s New York Times interview with Wilder is reprinted in Jackson R. Bryer, Ed., Conversations with Thornton Wilder (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 92–98. It is excerpted with the permission of Lindsey Gruson. Peter S. McGhee’s interview is reprinted in this same volume, pp. 99–105. Copyright © 1965, Vineyard Gazette, Inc. Reprinted by permission. Unless otherwise noted, all rights for all published and unpublished work by Thornton Wilder are reserved by the Wilder Family LLC.

  IMAGES

  Unless otherwise credited, images are taken from materials held in the Thornton Wilder Archive or by the Wilder family. The author picture by Paul Conklin, a favorite of its subject, was used in the original publication of the novel. It appears here once more with the kind permission of his widow, Ruth Merryman.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  In his quiet way, THORNTON NIVEN WILDER was a revolutionary writer who experimented boldly with literary forms and themes, from the beginning to the end of his long career. “Every novel is different from the others,” he wrote when he was seventy-five. “The theater (ditto). . . . ? The thing I’m writing now is again totally unlike anything that preceded it.” Wilder’s richly diverse settings, characters, and themes are at once specific and global. Deeply immersed in classical as well as contemporary literature, he often fused the traditional and the modern in his novels and plays, all the while exploring the cosmic in the commonplace. In a January 12, 1953, cover story, Time took note of Wilder’s unique “interplanetary mind”—his ability to write from a vision that was at once American and universal.

  A pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century letters, Wilder was a novelist and playwright whose works continue to be widely read and produced in this new century. He is the only writer to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both Fiction and Drama. His second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, received the Fiction award in 1928, and he won the prize twice in Drama, for Our Town in 1938 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1943. His other novels are The Cabala, The Woman of Andros, Heaven’s My Destination, The Ides of March, The Eighth Day, and Theophilus North. His other major dramas include The Matchmaker, which was adapted as the internationally acclaimed musical comedy Hello, Dolly!, and The Alcestiad. Among his innovative shorter plays are The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and The Long Christmas Dinner, and two uniquely conceived series, The Seven Ages of Man and The Seven Deadly Sins, frequently performed by amateurs.

  Wilder and his work received many honors, highlighted by the three Pulitzer Prizes, the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Order of Merit (Peru), the Goethe-Plakette der Stadt (Germany, 1959), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963), the National Book Committee’s first National Medal for Literature (1965), and the National Book Award for Fiction (1967).

  He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897, to Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Niven Wilder. The family later lived in China and in California, where Wilder was graduated from Berkeley High School. After two years at Oberlin College, he went on to Yale, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1920. A valuable part of his education took place during summers spent working hard on farms in California, Kentucky, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. His father arranged these rigorous “shirtsleeve” jobs for Wilder and his older brother, Amos, as part of their initiation into the American experience.

  Thornton Wilder studied archaeology and Italian as a special student at the American Academy in Rome (1920–1921), and earned a master of arts degree in French literature at Princeton in 1926.

  In addition to his talents as playwright and novelist, Wilder was an accomplished teacher, essayist, translator, scholar, lecturer, librettist, and screenwriter. In 1942, he teamed with Alfred Hitchcock to write the first draft of the screenplay for the classic thriller Shadow of a Doubt, receiving credit as principal writer and a special screen credit for his “contribution to the preparation” of the production. All but fluent in four languages, Wilder translated and adapted plays by such varied authors as Henrik Ibsen, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Obey. As a scholar, he conducted significant research on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the plays of Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega.

  Wilder’s friends included a broad spectrum of figures on both sides of the Atlantic—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Alexander Woollcott, Gene Tunney, Sigmund
Freud, producer Max Reinhardt, Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon, and Garson Kanin. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Wilder was especially close to Gertrude Stein and became one of her most effective interpreters and champions. Many of Wilder’s friendships are documented in his prolific correspondence. Wilder believed that great letters constitute a “great branch of literature.” In a lecture entitled “On Reading the Great Letter Writers,” he wrote that a letter can function as a “literary exercise,” the “profile of a personality,” and “news of the soul,” apt descriptions of thousands of letters he wrote to his own friends and family.

  Wilder enjoyed acting and played major roles in several of his own plays in summer theater productions. He also possessed a lifelong love of music; reading musical scores was a hobby, and he wrote the librettos for two operas based on his work: The Long Christmas Dinner, with composer Paul Hindemith, and The Alcestiad, with composer Louise Talma. Both works premiered in Germany.

  Teaching was one of Wilder’s deepest passions. He began his teaching career in 1921 as an instructor in French at Lawrenceville, a private secondary school in New Jersey. Financial independence after the publication of The Bridge of San Luis Rey permitted him to leave the classroom in 1928, but he returned to teaching in the 1930s at the University of Chicago. For six years, on a part-time basis, he taught courses there in classics in translation, comparative literature, and composition. In 1950–1951, he served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Wilder’s gifts for scholarship and teaching (he treated the classroom as all but a theater) made him a consummate, much-sought-after lecturer in his own country and abroad. After World War II, he held special standing, especially in Germany, as an interpreter of his own country’s intellectual traditions and their influence on cultural expression.

  During World War I, Wilder had served a three-month stint as an enlisted man in the Coast Artillery section of the army, stationed at Fort Adams, Rhode Island. He volunteered for service in World War II, advancing to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Army Air Force Intelligence. For his service in North Africa and Italy, he was awarded the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, the Chevalier Legion d’Honneur, and honorary officership in the Military Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.).

  From royalties received from The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder built a house for his family in 1930 in Hamden, Connecticut, just outside New Haven. But he typically spent as many as two hundred days a year away from Hamden, traveling to and settling in a variety of places that provided the stimulation and solitude he needed for his work. Sometimes his destination was the Arizona desert, the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, or Martha’s Vineyard, Newport, Saratoga Springs, Vienna, or Baden-Baden. He wrote aboard ships, and often chose to stay in “spas in off-season.” He needed a certain refuge when he was deeply immersed in writing a novel or play. Wilder explained his habit to a New Yorker journalist in 1959: “The walks, the quiet—all the elegance is present, everything is there but the people. That’s it! A spa in off-season! I make a practice of it.”

  But Wilder always returned to “the house The Bridge built,” as it is still known to this day. He died there of a heart attack on December 7, 1975.

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  BACK ADS

  ALSO BY THORNTON WILDER

  BOOKS BY THORNTON WILDER

  NOVELS

  The Cabala and The Woman of Andros

  The Bridge of San Luis Rey

  Heaven’s My Destination

  The Ides of March

  Theophilus North

  COLLECTIONS OF SHORT PLAYS

  The Angel That Troubled the Waters

  The Long Christmas Dinner & Other Plays in One Act

  PLAYS

  Our Town

  The Merchant of Yonkers

  The Skin of Our Teeth

  The Matchmaker

  The Alcestiad

  ESSAYS

  American Characteristics & Other Essays

  The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961

  CREDITS

  Getty Images; bottom © Fred Edwards/

  Getty images

  Author photograph © Paul Conklin

  COPYRIGHT

  HARPERPERENNIAL MODERNCLASSICS

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1967 by The Union & New Haven Trust Company, by arrangement with Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. It is here reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Thornton Wilder.

  THE EIGHTH DAY. Copyright © 1967 by The Union & New Haven Trust Company. Foreword copyright © 2006 by John Updike. Afterword copyright © 2006 by Tappan Wilder. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2006.

  ISBN 978-0-06-008891-0

  EPub Edition February 2014 ISBN 9780062232687

  13 14 15 16 17 ID/RRD 10 9 8 7 6

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  * Wilder read Fear and Trembling; if he read Concluding Scientific Postscript, he would have come across: “Is not his incognito this, that there is nothing whatever to be noticed, nothing at all that could arouse suspicion of the hidden inwardness.”

  [For the record, while based in Douglas, Wilder did take books from the University of Arizona library, but he always wore a necktie and never asked anyone from away to stop by to visit. There is no evidence he fed rattlesnakes. Plays for Bleecker Street opened at Circle-in-the Square Theatre on January 11, 1962 and ran for 132 performances.]